Juggling Entrepreneur Podcast
Get ready to dive into a treasure trove of inspiring interviews with parentpreneurs! Join us as we chat with parents who are juggling business ventures and family life. They’ll share their highs, lows, and golden nuggets of wisdom to help you thrive on your own entrepreneurial adventure. Tune in for some serious motivation and practical tips from those who truly get it!
Juggling Entrepreneur Podcast
Building Legacies: How Michael Pouliot Shapes Housing and Heritage
Michael Pouliot shares how he went from working construction sites in his family’s real estate business as a middle schooler to founding Eon, serving as CIO at Carbon, and overseeing $1.5B in acquisitions. His journey highlights the power of discipline, people, and purpose in building a lasting legacy.
- Gained early real estate insight working with his grandfather on construction sites
- Sets firm work-life boundaries by disconnecting at home to be fully present
- Brings Wall Street-level discipline and quality control to every venture
- Believes success comes from having the right people in the right roles
- Pays above market to align teams with high-impact outcomes
- Encourages entrepreneurs to take action rather than wait for perfection
- Focused on creating affordable workforce housing nationwide
- Measures success by legacy—hoping to celebrate his 100th surrounded by generations of family
Link: https://www.michaelpouliot.com/
Hi everyone. Welcome to the Juggling Entrepreneur podcast, the show where we explore what it really takes to balance business, family and big ambitions. Today's guest is Michael Puglio, a fourth-generation real estate entrepreneur, founder and CEO of Eon and the chief investment officer at Carbon, a middle-market private equity firm With over 15 years of experience spanning from Wall Street, consulting and real estate, michael brings a rare blend of hands-on know-how and financial precision to every deal he touches. From spending summers on job sites as a kid to overseeing $1.5 billion in real estate acquisitions, his journey is a masterclass in turning legacy hustle and vision into a lasting impact. He's also the host of DealFlow podcast and a passionate educator who is helping the next generation of real estate entrepreneurs rise. Generation of real estate entrepreneurs rise. Oh, and he is doing all while raising a young family in Boulder, colorado. If you have ever wondered how to juggle parenthood purpose and powerhouse investing, this episode is for you, so let's dive in. Welcome, michael.
Speaker 2:Thank you for having me. Thank you for that introduction.
Speaker 1:No worries, I try to cover all the amazing things that you do, but do you want to add anything more?
Speaker 2:I think you did a great job and sometimes when I hear my background out loud, it just makes me feel like yeah, like who is that person? Who's that person that did all that stuff? Because I sure seem tired now, but I guess it's because of all that stuff that happened.
Speaker 1:Right, I mean, I'm very inspired, so I'm ready to dig in to learn a little bit more about your amazing story. So, you grew up from the multi-generation real estate family and started learning the business as early as in middle school. How did those early experiences shape your approach to entrepreneurship and leadership today?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so thanks for that question. So yeah, my father was a developer, mostly single family luxury homes, Someone who would dig holes or level ground or operate as sort of like a gopher or go to shops and pick up toilets and such Something that you would have a day and more of a day labor or do character building sort of things. I would say, and but it was great pay for for someone of my age and not not a job I would have been able to get otherwise.
Speaker 2:And I think what I learned was that during that time which is something I learned from a lot of early jobs was that it was not something I really wanted to do long term. I didn't want to do that job. It was very hard work, long hours up very, very early. I would get up. I had the pleasure of my grandfather would work with us. He would operate sort of as a foreman on the job and so him and I would wake up very I would wake up very early. He would pick me up before the sun was up and we would drive, you know, sometimes up to two hours from where we live to where the job was. Got there, um and uh, worked, uh, essentially directly with my grandfather or for him. He didn't do any of the uh, the work part of it. He would sort of just sit and make sure people showed up and and did their work and uh, I, uh, and then we would work from, say, seven in the morning to three Uh. One of the benefits was that we did end the day a little earlier just because we were starting so early.
Speaker 2:But I think largely I learned that I did learn a lot about construction and learn a lot about the value of hard work and I learned a lot about how to manage projects, things like that, but generally, I think, learned that those types of projects were not where I was going to find my niche. It wasn't going to be the thing that I did. So it gave me good background. It gave me good experience to learn how those projects operate, how to complete certain types of construction, how to think about what something could be from just nothing. But that context I did take with me to my career today. But I spent a lot more time on more of the leadership, the team building, the systems design, and I leave the project management and the construction management to people who are better suited to that sort of follow through, attention to detail and project management sort of activities.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's great. That's a lot of work for a middle schooler, but great yeah yeah. So, as a founder for EON and CIO at Carbon, how did you juggle the operational demands of leading two companies while staying present with your family? It might be really challenging it might be really challenging.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's very challenging. So, you know, in Carbon I have a partner he's the CEO, his name is Cody and so we have a great, amazing team under us and that work with us to execute and run our properties, find and operate new deals, and so you know I have to. It's a testament to a great team that we're able to do everything that we are able to do. As it relates to Eon, we're really focused on educating and bringing people through a journey of trying to figure out where they're going to fit inside of the real estate world, from their first deal to their hundredth deal, whatever that might look like. And so we're looking to educate them, help them, coach them and potentially help them build that business from scratch, if that's something they're looking to do. And so the businesses are somewhat complimentary. They are adjacent to each other, they all exist within the housing world and we're all ultimately just trying to provide, you know, great results for clients, whether it be on the single family side or, in the case of carbon, a much larger assets that can be, you know, 10, 20, 30, $50 million each. And then, so far as on the family side, you know, I do my best to keep the. I have an office outside of my home, so I do my best to try to keep work at the office and, when I go home, be as present as possible.
Speaker 2:I would say that I'm not always 100% at that. I do my very best. But sometimes there's definitely a bleeding of worlds between the professional and the personal and I tend to have a very busy day on calls and various activities. So sometimes I get home and realize, oh, I didn't do this, I didn't do that, I didn't close off that loop and I didn't tie this off, and so there can be a little bit of a wind down period and kind of like a transition period that's necessary, be a little bit of a wind down period and, you know, kind of like a transition period that's necessary, um, that, um that. That can be frustrating, I think, for the family that I'm not as present that I as I should be, and so what I try to do is either leave the phone in the car and when I get home, or leave it in the laundry room and then just, uh, try to kind of like COVID, you know you took off all your, you know you came home, you took off all your clothes or whatever, and you know then.
Speaker 2:So it's kind of like that, it's sort of like a sanitization and then kind of come inside, and then you know all the kids are dying to see me by the time I get home, so as as is my wife, and so I try to give them as much attention as I can.
Speaker 1:I love the idea of sanitization. Maybe I should try to come home from work, but lovely idea. Really makes sense, though, so that when we go and present ourselves to the family, they really feel that we are committed to them for the time that we are there, and that is really important in building a very healthy family. So, thank you, that was a really great tip building a very healthy family. So thank you, that was a really great tip. You have worked with top tier financial institutions like Goldman Sachs, jp Morgan, merrill Lynch. How did that experience actually shape your approach? There is always lesson learned from organizations. There are always lessons learned from the experiences from personal life, and you have a father who is an entrepreneur himself, so how did that all shape the way you think, the way you strategize and the way you handle the things around?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So if I start, I guess, with the corporate experience and how that affected me or how I bring that into my business today, I started my career so I had my undergrad in finance and I moved from there. I worked through the analyst program at JP Morgan in York and for their fixed income desk in investment management, and I think that job is very much like you would see in the movies or on TV shows. I worked on a trading desk lots of computer screens, bloomberg terminals, everyone's yelling at each other trading securities and things like that and it was a very high-paced, high-stress environment, long hours, and so I think what I learned?
Speaker 2:A couple of things I learned, and really it was based on mentors, having bosses that helped me understand these things, helped me understand these things, and one of them was that you know, in in I may be, a lot of jobs, but certainly in investment management and on wall street there was an intense focus on getting everything done that sort of the day it was assigned because there was usually some sort of client deadline, some sort of deadline that we were trying to hit.
Speaker 2:So I would frequently be working on things that had to get done by the end of the day and they were assigned that day.
Speaker 2:So you sort of had to, no matter what. You kind of got to this point where anything that you started you knew you could get done in the same day, even if that day meant you started it at. You know you got it assigned at two in the afternoon and you may have to work till six in the morning the next day to get it done. You know you just would just keep going until it was done and there was no, there was no option to not get it done in the amount of time, because the client may be coming in at 10 AM and you had to have it ready by six because your MD was going to come in and look at the work and give you comments, and then you needed time to make the edits and then have them look at it again and then, uh, finalize it, then bring it to the printer, have it printed, make sure it was printed right, look at every page, check it before.
Speaker 2:So there's just, and then all that stuff usually would have you have like minutes, uh, that you know, from the client's perspective it was like this has been ready forever, but on our side it was a flurry of activity and it was almost um.
Speaker 2:So I think just having that expectation that you can kind of get anything done, uh, as as in the time that you have allotted, I think, is a really powerful um, just skill or like habit to develop inside of yourself. And um, the second would be, uh, in the same vein, uh, my one of my bosses, her name Margaret, would always tell me that we had to have like an intense level of paranoia as it related to client meetings, and so there was this sort of unspoken rule that you know you can make one error and that would be okay. You wouldn't be okay, but it would be okay. The second time it happened you'd be fired, and so you basically you know you only had had one. It was like a two-strike system. So if you ever, if there was a in a client setting right, if a client saw an, error you got one freebie.
Speaker 2:If a client saw a second error, that would be it. You'd be fired and you that would be the end of your career at the company. And so, um, that intense paranoia was built around that rule. It was that, okay, well, we had to make sure that you had a sufficient maker checker system. You made sure that whatever work you were putting out there, your draft was 100% error free, and so I think that intense level of paranoia is something that you know.
Speaker 2:Really I bring to um, you know my businesses now and help uh. Hopefully I'm not as uh hard on my teams as maybe I was uh treated uh earlier in my career, but I think that there is some benefit to having that level of expectation of yourself and of your people to make sure that, um, if, if you know, especially in the investment business where you're managing other people's money, uh, or their projects, their livelihoods, uh, you know, especially in the investment business where you're managing other people's money or their projects, their livelihoods, you know an error in a footnote doesn't seem like a big deal, but you know, if that's wrong, then you know maybe the big stuff is wrong. So I always you know it starts with the small stuff and how you do. One thing is how you do everything, I guess. So those would be some of the big lessons that I've learned from that intense period of my life. I don't know if I think you had a couple other questions in there, but I'll pause there and just see where other stuff you have there.
Speaker 1:That's a great point and that's what most of the people misunderstand about being an entrepreneur or being a person in the leadership role around their accountability towards the team. Being a person in the leadership role around their accountability towards the team, and sometimes they feel like it's a very high expectations, but they don't understand that you're trying to bring the best from them right. That is a true leadership by itself and the way I understood it. You have been trained, you have learned your lessons from your experience and you're trying to use those valuable principles on your team and it's going to enhance the performance and it's going to enhance the personalities within your team for their own better good.
Speaker 2:Yeah, for their own good yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, definitely, yeah for the wrong good. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Let's move on to some of the core things that you do right now. You have successfully led the distressed property acquisitions and turnarounds. What are the key lessons that you have learned? Navigating the deals that didn't go according to your plan?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, so I would say the number one thing specifically to this question is really about having great people in the right seats. So we run all our businesses on a couple of different operating systems, depending on which business, but we either EOS or IDX, us or IDX, but in both operating modalities, essentially everything is based on having the right people in the right seats doing the right activities, and so, whenever there's been a project that hasn't gone to plan yes, sometimes the Federal Reserve will increase interest rates or something will happen that you really can't control, but you have the right people in the right seats. They're going to know how to navigate that situation, and so you can't be everywhere, and what you can do, though, is do your best to hire the right people, train them properly and give them the coaching they need to be able to, you know, make decisions to solve problems in a way that would be consistent with what we would want them to do, and, ultimately, they will naturally come to the same conclusions that you would want them to if you've hired them properly and you've trained them properly. So I would say that's the biggest thing, the biggest lead metric that I see on projects where we're doing multi-million dollar construction projects on larger assets and just managing those properties.
Speaker 2:It's typically that there's someone missing from the team, like hey, we're missing a leasing agent, so no wonder we're unable to lease the units at the bottom we want. Or someone is in the role that is just not the right fit, and sometimes that's because we've inherited that person from an acquisition and we just haven't turned that position over yet. Or maybe they become disillusioned with the job, or maybe there's some personal issue that's going on that we need to dig into. Maybe they are the right person. They're just not showing up at that moment in the position because of something that's going on, or it just sometimes it takes a little bit of time for things to turn around.
Speaker 2:So, but again, I think it all comes down to really great people investing in those people, paying them really well. Um, I, in my experience of paying extra, uh, paying more than market. Um, the benefit of paying more than the market rate is that people aren't constantly looking for other positions Uh, they're focused on the job, they're focused on being successful. Looking for other positions, they're focused on the job, they're focused on being successful. And if you can create a reward system that continues to incentivize them around the KPIs, the metrics that you want, the outcomes that you're desiring and that are important for the success of the project. They will go above and beyond to achieve those, and that's what I've seen be the most successful.
Speaker 1:And it kind of summarizes one of the key foundation for any successful organization, which are three. Usually, we say there are three P's right Product, people and process. And it's amazing that you have taught the importance of people and keeping them motivated and keeping them properly trained so that they can do their jobs properly, and it's not every time we come into a conversation that we talk about that aspect of it. So again, thank thank you, Michael, for bringing that up. We are going to wrap this forecast by asking the last two amazing questions that will cover the key takeaway.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Great. So for someone listening who's raising a family and thinking about starting a business or making their first real estate investment, what's one mindset shift that can help them to move forward with confidence?
Speaker 2:shift they can use to move forward, if they wanted to start a business or take the leap to entrepreneurship, is it's sort of like, just go for it. I don't know if you can really just I know that sounds a little bit cliche, maybe, but I think a lot of people get tied up in this. A lot of internal objections around I need to know more, I need to have more time, I need to wait till the time is right, till the economy is better, and really the best time to start is yesterday, and you know whether that may mean you know a small step in the right direction and you're going to build that habit every single day, moving towards where you want to go, and it may, you know. You look back five years from now. You're going to be surprised where you are. I'm certainly surprised where I am.
Speaker 2:I only left corporate America, I guess, a little bit less than 10 years ago. We've done some pretty amazing things, and so I think you just have to be willing to take that leap of faith and know that you're going a little bit into the abyss and you're not going to know everything. You're not You're, and you're only going to learn it by doing it. So just take, take the leap of faith and know that you know you have everything you need inside of you, and then you'll the rest of you, learn as you go.
Speaker 1:OK, that is very motivational. I got inspired right now. So thank you, Michael. One last question before we wrap up this podcast Looking ahead, what's your vision, not just for your companies, but for how you want to shape the future of real estate and entrepreneurship for the next generation?
Speaker 2:Sure, yeah. So I thought you were going to say shape the. Yeah, I thought you were going to say, not just for my business but also for my family. But I'll take the, I'll do this, I'll do the whole question that you asked.
Speaker 1:So yes, and please definitely include the family. That's important.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yes, so I'll answer the first part and then I'll put my little bit in there at the end. So, yeah, I would say, you know we've been able to acquire a lot of property. Our goal with our businesses is to provide clean, safe, affordable housing for, you know, kind of middle income workforce housing. Throughout the United States we see that as a continued growing need to have affordable, safe housing and there's a huge shortage, and I think we can do our part as operators of real estate not just financiers, but also people who we own and operate our own properties and so we feel like we can become a top 100 owner in the country and provide really safe housing and hopefully improve the reputation of landlords and private equity individuals. I think that you know the current environment is such that perhaps we don't have the best, or there's a there's a perception that we don't have the best intentions as it relates to providing housing to folks, and I believe that there is a private sector solution to providing housing in America and if we don't do a good enough job doing that, there will be a government solution, and so I feel like, as on the private side, as a capitalist, I want to be able to provide a great solution and that people can be happy living in our properties and they can build their families, they can feel safe there, they can send their kids to school and enjoy the playgrounds and the pools and all the amenities that we have. So that's what my goal is overall like. In that way, from a numbers perspective, I want to get to the point where we're acquiring a billion dollars of property every single year. It's not a again, we have to acquire property that's consistent with our mandate, with our strategy, that makes sense financially and makes sense for our investors. But you know, getting to that goal will require us to continue to build strong teams, put great processes in place and have a great product that you had talked about, the three P's. So having a great product, which is the apartment at the end of the day, uh, for folks.
Speaker 2:So, uh, now the other piece of it, the family piece. My goal with my family is, um, you know, I would love to be, I love to live healthy a long time, uh, and be 100 years old, uh, and sitting, uh, all of my children, all of their children, all of their children at dinner for my birthday. So that's what I like and I, from my, from my perspective of I've done that. It means that all my children speak to me, which is, I think, in today's environment is not necessarily a given. It means that you know I've got a, you know a bountiful family of all of my, you know all my descendants and I can enjoy that. At that point I'll be 100. So you know, I don't know how well I'm moving around at that point, but hopefully well enough to be able to do that. So that's my goal.
Speaker 2:It's something that I saw with my grandfather got to do that, and so I looked at that and I said, wow, and I was. You know, he's passed away some time ago now, but I was a teenager at that point and I don't think I really understood how rare it is to have you know, all your kids, all your grandkids, et cetera, in one room and celebrating, you know, with you. So that's my goal and I think that it's an outcome of a successful life from my perspective.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that is very great to hear, michael. So I'm so glad that you have said it, because there have been situations where people get so much stuck in entrepreneurship journey that they really lose the part of the value of family and, as Michael has said, both family life and entrepreneurship are very valuable to have a successful and content life. So thank you, michael, once again for joining on our podcast, and you have an amazing day ahead thank you so much.
Speaker 2:I appreciate you having me on.