Elevating Individuals Through Mentorship
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Meet Jessica Francis, the Land Acquisition Manager for Drees Homes and the youngest sitting President of the Northern Virginia Builders Industry Association (NVBIA). In this episode of TERN Talks, Jessica unpacks her incredible journey, sharing how her Psychology degree unexpectedly prepared her for success in the male-dominated field of land acquisition and development. She offers invaluable insights on everything from door-knocking at age 24 to the profound shift of learning to set boundaries as a working parent. Discover how Jessica is championing younger generation leadership in homebuilding and how her secret to success lies in turning feelings into a “superpower”.
In TERN Talks, we have a new friend of mine, Jessica Francis. I’m excited to connect with Jessica. We found each other at a panel discussion back in November 2025. Whenever I meet somebody who’s not only super interesting, but has a great story and can command an audience. You know that’s the right person to bring on a show.
A little bit about Jessica. Jessica is the land acquisition manager for Drees Homes here in Northern Virginia. She is also currently the youngest sitting president of the NVBIA. She’ll tell us what those initials are in just a second. She’s also my first VCU graduate on the show. She’s a proud VCU graduate with a degree in Psychology. We might ask, “How do you go from psychology to Drees Homes?” We’ll get to that in a minute.
Jessica also brings nearly a decade of experience in land acquisition and development with Relux Homes, D.R. Horton, and coming up on eight years at her current role at Drees. She’s passionate about strategic growth, forecasting future communities, and championing women’s and younger generation leadership development in home building. All while balancing her life with her husband, their beautiful daughter, and her rambunctious chocolate lab. She’s got a lot of stuff going on. We all do. We’re going to unpack some of this with Jessica. Jessica, welcome to TERN Talks. It’s so nice to have you here.
Thank you. I’m so excited to be here. You gave a little background on how we met. Doing that panel with you is so fun. I’m super excited to do this talk with you.
When I met you, I was like, “She has just got so much going on. I wish that I was as positive and connected and as ambitious as she was when I was her age.” It’s been great to get to know you since November and bring you here onto this show. You know who our audience is. One of the things that I found so interesting about you when we met is that you had this background in Psychology.
Oftentimes, students will say, “What if I don’t end up doing what I studied? Is that going to be a waste of my education?” Why don’t you connect the dots for us? As far as you decide on Psychology, which by the way, is a cool major. You end up as one of the few women in land acquisition and this whole business of building and development. That’s not a typical path for a lot of women. Can you unpack that for us a little bit?
Yeah, for sure. You did talk a little bit about my history of careers before I got to Drees. What’s interesting is that before I even started at Relux, which is my first builder job, I was working at Keller Williams. I was literally just a front desk coordinator and trainer. The reason that that’s an important part of the story is because I did not know, when I got out of school, exactly what I wanted to do.
I took a position where I got to interact with people. I got the background. My mom used to work at that location for Keller Williams. She said, “Why don’t you just go try? See if you like it and get connected with some people.” What I loved was every single day, every single person that would walk into that office would see me first thing.
The first thing I got to do was say hi to them. I’d catch up with them. I learned about them. One of my favorite things to do is talk. That was basically what I got to do. That job was just talking to people, connecting from that position, and just learning about people. I had a nice wife of a builder who said, “I would love it if you’d come and work for me. Every day I see you’re super positive. You’re always helpful. I want you to come and try to work at my company.”
Again, because I didn’t feel like I had a huge compass for where I wanted to be initially. I was like, “This is great. It’s an opportunity. I’ll try. I’ll shift into something else.” That’s how I got into just home building in general. To me, it was just cool because again, it was just me meeting, networking, and learning about people at the time.
After that experience, they threw me into “We need you to learn a bunch of different things in this role.” One of them was land. I had to door-knock. I was literally going to people’s houses, door-knocking and saying, “Hi. Would you like to sell your property to me?” When I tell you that that was an extremely humbling experience.
How old were you?
I was maybe 24 or 25.
They’re thinking, “Who’s this baller thinking she can ask for a property?”
People were not always kind. I remember coming back from work one day. I’m talking to my dad, and say, “I don’t know if I’m good at this job.” I’ve been here three to six months at this point. I get so upset when people tell me no. I feel hurt. I feel rejected. It’s a hard experience. He’s like, “What’s the worst they can say other than no?” I said, “I don’t know. I haven’t thought about that. All they tell me is no.” I get a lot of those. After ten nos, it just feels hard to hear. He’s like, “That’s literally the worst thing they could tell you. Just no, we don’t want to do this.”
I have a philosophy on that. I say it often and like you, I did cold calling. Which, cold calling is the worst thing. I did it for the early part of my career, too. I often tell people that my favorite word being that I came from a sales background is yes. I’m sure that was your favorite word too. I quickly learned, and I think this is where your father was going with it, that no was my second favorite word. The reason for that is because both are directional. At least I know. It stung. After you hear it a thousand times, it stings less, then you’re like, “Alright, I can just keep going.” You end up door-knocking. It’s part of your early career.
I felt like what I ended up getting attached to, because I learned a lot of parts of the business. I learned permitting and grading. I learned other aspects of home building. I got to deal with actual homeowners and help them with change order requests. As I went more and more through that, the land part was always the coolest part to me.
The reason being was when I did find a property and it was something we ended up building on, I felt so much pride of ownership of like, “I found that property.” I helped get us to the point where we could put a house on it. Someone could be purchasing it a year later. That part of the process, as much as the lows, there were the highs of that.
That’s what directed me that way. I only learned that by again being exposed to different pieces of the process initially. I just was like, “I want to do this full-time. How can I do this for a bigger builder? How can I move this out of just doing something small?” At the time, I felt like I was outgrowing them. It was just a feeling of there were only so many opportunities they could give me to move up because they were a very small company. After, I went to work for DR Horton.
How old were you when you went to go work for DR Horton?
I was 26 or 27 when I shifted over there. I started around 23 or 24 at the other position.
As a recap, because that was a lot, what you just said. That was a lot in a short period of time. One, you just showed up at a job because your mom happened to be there. Being that you were there all the time and you were exposed to everybody that was walking through the door. You always had a great attitude. You got noticed with your great attitude. You had somebody who saw some level of promise in you and decided to offer you this. As you said, you didn’t have a sense of, “What am going to do anyway? Sure. I’ll go try this.”
What I also love is that in your trying and doing the door-knocking and all those other things. They were saying, “We want to teach you this. You’re going to have to do that.” You quickly learned what you didn’t like to do in order to become what you did like to do. Which if they have land man in Texas, we got land woman in the DMV, being Jessica Francis. You’re the land woman of the DMV. You like that. This is finally years. How old were you when you graduated, 21-22?
I did an extra semester. I was a fifth-year person. I did, with my extra semester, I still was 21. I had not turned 22 yet.
Within about six years. It took you some time to figure out “What I like, what I don’t like.” You showed up. You had somebody who saw something in you. You decided to go with it.
I said yes a lot of times when people ask me for help on things that might not have been my typical role too. I will say that. I feel like I always said yes because I was like, “Maybe I’ll learn something from this.” Fast forward, I don’t say yes to everything. You said this to me, Tina. No is a complete sentence. I’m learning that. In the early days, I did feel like it benefited me to be able to say yes because I didn’t have barriers for time like I do now. That served me well in my early years. People were like, “Jessica’s extremely helpful. She’s willing to pitch in. She’s willing to learn.” That helped me a lot in the early days.
Let’s talk about that because I know you’re passionate about this. I know this is a topic that when we were on that panel, you were talking about the balance of things. You have fast forwarded to having a lovely family, including your daughter and your chocolate lab. It’s not just you anymore. It’s you and more. You talked about boundaries. What do you want to share about boundaries and where you are?
Boundaries are extremely tough for me. They are probably the most difficult thing that I have had to learn since the start of my career. The reason being is that, again, I have this tendency to want to people-please. Be like, “How can I help somebody? How can I be someone that is a team player?” A lot of times what you hear is, “Try to be that.”
Boundaries don’t come easy—but they’re absolutely essential. Share on XPeople also just don’t teach you that it’s okay to say no. To say that, “I only have so much finite time that I can give to this particular project or I can only do these particular items to be able to do my job well.” I started to learn that boundary. Mostly because of my home life and my home time. There’s nothing more important than that to me. Absolutely nothing more important.
My kid notices that I’m not there. I became more mindful of that only because I have a little person watching me that notices if I can’t show up to stuff. The boundaries are absolutely essential. The hardest thing I found before was that I had a lot of guilt around it. I either had guilt that I wasn’t showing up for certain things at work or I had guilt that I wasn’t showing up for certain things at home.
Instead, I just said, “I am giving my time to this at this particular time. I’m not going to feel bad about it because I know I’m giving it a finite piece of time. I’m going to be home. I’m going to be fully involved. Phone away, I’m not picking up anything. I’m not texting anyone. I’m here. I’m present. My kid can see that.” That’s the hardest thing that’s around is the guilt. You just feel like you can’t escape it.
How have you gotten through some of that guilt? You just deal with it? You know it’s there?
I tell myself that there’s nothing productive about it. Me feeling guilty only takes away from me being present either at home or being present at work. If I can’t be present then in either of those locations, I’m not able to give my best. To be realistic, I do have days where I come home and I tell my husband, “I need fifteen minutes to sit alone in silence in my room. Nobody talk to me. Don’t come bother me. I don’t want to see Ellie, the dog.”
I just want to be in silence, whether that’s to decompress so that I can transition out of being in work mode. Truly speaking, sometimes, I want to cry. I’m having a bad day and I want to cry. I want to do it alone. That’s also a way for you to release some of the emotion around. Sometimes, there is emotion around the boundaries, but you don’t actually deal with it in the moment.
My way is like, “How can I find a way to still deal with it?” It’s going to come back and affect me in some way. It’s unrealistic to say you’re not going to have that. It’s more just like, when do you give it space and time? For me, a couple of times a week, give it space and time to just be like, “I’m feeling a lot of feelings. I’m going to actually feel them, then I’m going to be able to be present in the rest of my life.”
A couple of things that you said that I wanted to highlight. One, you never said the word mom. I appreciate that because I don’t think that what you described is just a mom thing. What you described is a parent thing. I’ve worked with plenty of men who have also said, “I’m always on the road. I’m missing these ball games. I’m missing these dance recitals.” They have the same level of guilt that you just shared.
That’s a universal thing when people choose to become more than themselves and add extra people in their lives. I appreciate that you said all of that in a way where it was very inclusive. The other thing with the boundaries and the saying no is you have decided to become the youngest president of NVBIA. I’m going to ask you one for the audience that doesn’t know what NVBIA stands for. Can you tell us what it stands for?
Tell us what led to your decision to take that on. I’m assuming, one of the things is you’ve decided on purpose. You said that you don’t multitask. It sounds like you’re “I’m either going to be in work or I’m going to be in home. I’m not going to put a baby on the lap, trying to type and write a proposal all at the same time.” You have this, not just boundary, but a degree of separation that allows you to be strong in all these areas. Talk to us about the NVBIA presidency part and why you chose to do that.
For the benefit of the audience, it’s Northern Virginia Builders Industry Association, which is a mouthful, which is why we say NVBIA. I’ve been part of that organization since I was at Relux. That was at that 24-year-old range. It’s been over a decade, which is awesome. There is so much I benefited from over time in creating networks and relationships.
At a certain point in time, there’s a little piece of this. It’s a five-year track to get into presidency. You have to serve in so many roles before you can get up to where I’m at. There was a point where I had to kick this off. I’m going to be 36 this 2026. I basically was 31. This was before I was pregnant with my first daughter, before I thought about any other kids, anything.
I was asked, “Would you want to be in a leadership role?” It’s funny because I came home and talked to my husband. I was like, “We talked about having a kid next year. What if I’m president of my association at the same time I’m having a kid?” Mind you, I was president of a chapter while I was pregnant with my daughter. I had to take leave. We just made it work. People filled in and helped out. Part of it was that there was that leadership track.
By the way, being pregnant is not a disease. It’s a temporary thing. You’re like, “How is this all going to work out?” It’s a temporary state.
I’m not gone for good. In my mind, it was just a lot of things swirling because I felt such a commitment. I have to show up for everything. As time went on, I tried to write myself. I have a paid position. I have a volunteer position. This is still my volunteer position. I enjoy it. I have to treat it as such. There’s things that I can manageably accomplish and do.
When 2025 came up and I was VP, I will give a little credit to the person that was on the track above me. His name is Saif. He was so instrumental in being a support, a role model, and a leader. I want to give him some credit. He came up the whole four years on the track with me. I was the VP behind him. That was another aspect. I had this confidence level of, I know I have the five-year track, but I also know I have someone who’s incredibly smart and connected. Who’s going to bring me into the fold, teach me things, and also give me some confidence and responsibility on my own. That was the second piece of it.
That’s huge. Let’s just say his whole name and if you know where he is.
His full name is Saifaldin Rahman. I probably said that wrong. That’s why he goes by Saif because it’s a little bit easier to say. He’s Muslim. His background is Muslim. He’s very connected to the Muslim community. He speaks sometimes at mosques. He does an incredible job, again, of being in a connected network. He’s also a parent to four kids who are all older. He’s got one of them going into college soon.
Is he still working in the building?
He is. He does real estate development all over Northern Virginia. Essentially, he gets projects entitled through the planning part of it. He sold quite a few projects. We’ve worked on several with him as well. There was a land connection there as well that sparked initially our friendship and our mentorship. That continued to build. I still call him for stuff.
I was going to say. We like to highlight our mentors on this show for obvious reasons. We gave him the shout out. He just needs to know that he made a difference in allowing somebody to take the leadership role behind him through example. That’s important. We’ll get to that later. That’s another topic that you and I talked about at the conference. Keep going.
That was the second piece of me saying yes. There was a timeline to track. There was a good mentor. The third piece of it was that as I got through more and more organization stuff, I saw people in their leadership roles. There are certain things I actually started to envision. I have this own vision of how I feel NVBIA could have improvements. How we could do better or things that we could look at ahead.
You and I have talked about this before, Tina. I do feel strongly about this. Mentorship is one thing. I also call it succession planning. There’s a lot of people in our industry and in leadership roles who maybe in the next five years will not be. They’re going to be retiring. They’re going to be doing other pursuits. I started to see that a little bit as I came up through NVBIA.
Mentorship isn’t just guidance—it’s succession planning, preparing the next generation to lead as today’s leaders step aside. Share on XI said, “I want to be involved with helping make sure that this organization continues to have engaged people who can feel confident doing the roles that some of these people that are leaving are doing.” That vision started to show up for me. I was like, “I need to figure out a way to get to a place where I can implement this.” To me, that was presidency. That’s how I can do it. I can get into my president role and have an impact.
I love your vision of seeing that there is this silver tsunami of people, particularly in your industry that have been there for decades that have institutional knowledge. We have AI and all this stuff, but at the end of the day, their knowledge may sunset in that tsunami. You don’t want that to sunset. You want that to carry forward. You want their name to carry forward. You want their knowledge to carry forward.
Let me ask you. Do you have enough people behind that have been hired that can come in and do these jobs? Are you all struggling with finding the right people? This isn’t one of those things where it’s like, “We’re going to go down to VCU. We’re going to recruit. We’re going to start recruiting for land people at VCU.” How do people get in? I know how you got into it, quite on an accident. Do you have enough people coming in to take on this knowledge that might be exiting?
Probably a short answer would be no in some senses because I do feel like the home building industry is still an industry where we don’t have a significant amount. Workforce is a huge issue for us, but we don’t have a significant amount of young people who think of construction, home building, and land as industries they could break into. They’re like, “I don’t know a lot about it. I don’t have the degree.” Like me. They might feel like they can’t.
You’re the part of that that is not shown on HGTV.
My point is that it’s so multifaceted. In our home building association, there’s definitely a good amount of people that are in land. Even that, I was joking. I would probably be considered a mid-level in terms of my experience in land. If you look at it, it’s on both ends of the spectrum. You usually have people that are been doing it for 30 years. You got people that have been doing it for 2 to 3 to 4.
You’ve got no one in the middle, which is tough. I do think when you talk about the transition, we probably don’t have enough. The positive has been that this 2026, I thought initially that my goal was going to be “I want to help with strategic planning and a five-year.” Which is, of course, hugely important to me.
I started to shift. I had people reach out to me that were at their companies. They said, “I’d love to be more involved.” It’s people who just literally called me out of the blue. They don’t know me extremely well, but they know that I’m president. They’ve said, “I’d love to get coffee and ask you how could I be more involved.”
All of a sudden, I started to say maybe I’m actually bridging some inclusivity. Maybe I’m creating an environment where people are like, “I feel comfortable to come, talk to Jessica, and ask to be more included.” Maybe there are more people than I would have originally thought. Only because if you look at it from the outside, we’re still a little sparse when it comes to the new people coming in. Maybe it’s that there’re people there. They just don’t feel like they have a platform to say, “What do I do?”
They don’t know where to go. They don’t have the confidence to say, “Should I be involved in this organization? Should I be a chapter president? Should I be in legislative committee?” We’ve got so many avenues. That was cool. All of a sudden, I shifted to maybe that’s more my role than I thought, initially. I care about younger generations and women, but I realized that it’s more than that. People care about reaching out and asking me for that help too.
You and I had talked at one point in time about the darker side of this whole silver tsunami and the knowledge moving on. That is that sometimes as wonderful as we can position and say, “These folks are moving on to retirement. We want to capture their knowledge. Help them get connected with others within the organization so that we’ve got this seamless transition.” You also shared with me that sometimes it’s not so seamless because people are worried about, “If I give my knowledge away, then I’m no longer useful.” Talk to me about your thoughts around that because that was interesting.
We did talk about that. That’s a very real thing. It’s that piece of it, which is that, “I don’t want to feel like I’m not an integral part of my company, whether that’s training or sharing the knowledge piece.” People who are retiring that have been there for 25-30 years. You can’t just do three months before you leave and that’s enough. It is a process.
The other part of it I hear is, “I’m so busy. How could I give a couple hours of my week to train somebody?” I hear that, too. I hear the busyness factor will be so difficult for me to put in that time. In a 40-hour work week, two hours should be nothing. I don’t feel like it is, but I hear that. I do feel like there’s also this, “I did things this way. I’m holding on to my process on this. I feel like it’s a good process. I feel uncomfortable with having to change that or having to modify that or having to accommodate a different style.” I hear a lot of that as well.
It is tough. The thing is, I try to balance between the respect of the people who have been there for so long that deserve to have opportunities to be still involved and be deeply embedded in the industry. I’m also like, “How do we get those people to feel like sharing the information is a positive thing? It’s a benefit. How do we get those people to also say this different way? It’s not my usual way, but I’m open to trying it.” There’s a mismatch between those. That’s what creates some of the friction of change.
For our audience, for the other leaders that are reading, reach out to Jessica. This is a bridge that she is trying to build. She’s trying to solve these issues. I heard at least three. One is, “This is my way. I don’t necessarily want to do it any other way.” That’s something that she needs to solve for in building this bridge. “I’m too busy” is another thing she’s trying to solve for. I can see her face. I’m not buying the, “I’m too busy.”
How do you work with someone who is “too busy?” The real fear, which a lot of people have as they’re considering retirement, is “How am I going to matter?” Jessica, I love the fact that you already said this is not a three-month thing and done. What I’ve seen in a lot of industries is this institutional survivalist character that comes up.
It’s like, “I’m going to keep myself busy. I’m going to hold onto the knowledge. I’m going to make myself of importance. That way I can’t be let go.” That is a scarcity model as opposed to an abundance model. To switch people in their mindset from scarcity to abundance, that is a big paradigm shift. I know you’re going to do an amazing job because of your level of enthusiasm and your optimism. If there’s anybody out there that wants to give Jessica their two cents, I know that she’s open to take a seat back on these things.
You and I talked about abundance. We also talked about, at one point, authenticity. That has been beneficial for me to try to show up and be very open about what my life’s like. That I’m in my extremely busy season. I have a lot of stuff going on at work. I am not perfect in any way at doing my role as president.
Authenticity changes things. Showing up openly and sharing your real life makes all the difference. Share on XIt’s a volunteer position. I do my best. That aspect of it has made this role more fun. It’s disarmed people to be able to share their experience and what they see trying to be a part of association too, which has been huge. I take that strongly. I appreciate that people trust me to come and say, “I want to be more involved. How can I be?” They trust me to tell that information.
Your volunteer role, even though you dedicate a lot of time to that and obviously effort. It seems like you were very purposeful in bringing that role into your life. It also augments your paid role. As far as how you think, how you work with people, different ideas. It’s a nice one-two punch that you have going for you in your career planning.
I hope I’m allowed to talk about this. Before we even got on air, I said, “How are you?” You said, “Fine.” I said, “What’s trepidation in that?” Without naming any names, you shared a real thing that you’re dealing with. I love the fact that you just pre-empted it by saying, “I’m not perfect in my role. I’m still learning things.”
I want to bring it up for our audience. Right before we get on this show, Jessica tells me about a difficult situation. She’s doing this show with me, but she has to have a call after this call to deal with the situation. Let’s just talk about the difficult situations that you have to deal with in your life. You can use that as an example. How are you managing through that?
You gave me great advice. Thank you because I can walk away with that. When I hopped on, I did have, in the back of my mind, this situation. It was something where he felt particularly emotionally charged on this topic and had a reaction that I was not totally expecting at the moment. It was a very calm, relaxed conversation up until we got to this point that revolved around timing.
I work in a role where I’m negotiating contracts. Time is extremely valuable to every single person that I work with. He got upset and did not like that there was some additional time left to wrap this, get it to a closure, and be in contract. Again, this was not something I was expecting to happen. What I had shared with Tina was that after he was done saying what he was saying, I basically decided I was in fawn response.
My fawn response is if someone gets upset, I want to try to smooth over a situation. I want to try to people-please. I want to try to breeze through, be very understanding and accommodating. That is my nature in a situation where I may feel uncomfortable or I feel off-guard. I wasn’t expecting that to happen. Instead of doing that, which is my typical response, I just said, “I’d like to take a pause on this. I want to talk about it with my team. I’m going to get back with you tomorrow. I’ll find time to talk with you.”
When I say the call pretty much ended after that, there was nothing negative. He said, “Okay. Thank you.” We hung up. I felt so much better when I got off that call. I was feeling intense. I was feeling upset. For me, being able to just pause was such a huge thing. Tina, you shared why that was important. I do feel people don’t feel pause is an option sometimes.
You think, “I’ve got to deal with this now.” There’s just this urgency factor, but someone else’s urgency doesn’t have to be my urgency. I just have to remind myself of that. I deal with that, by the way, constantly. I don’t always deal with people being that emotionally charged. Sometimes it’s more, sometimes it’s less. In those situations, I pause.
First of all, thank you for sharing something that was on your mind. I was like, “We got to clear this before we just go and have fun on this show.” When you shared that with me, you reminded me and taught me again about the pause. We live in Northern Virginia. We are in a fast-paced environment. Everybody wants everything done.
Sometimes, pause is the right thing. The road rage that we see here is pretty incredible. To match anger with anger isn’t always the best method unless you’re a gladiator in the arena. You reminded me of that. I’d never heard the term because I had to think about it. When Jessica said, I went into fawn mode, I was like, “What word did she just use?”
I was like, “She used fawn.” When I thought of a baby fawn, all of a sudden everything in my body just relaxed. I was like, “Baby fawn’s so cute. Protect the baby fawn.” Jessica’s going to have this conversation. I hope my advice works. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with telling this person the reason you took the pause.
We had talked about the fact that maybe this person’s thinking, “You punted me. Why would you punt me? Why are you delaying this further?” Her doing a very brief explanation of, “Thank you for giving me the pause. I go into fawn mode sometimes when there’s a lot coming at me. I want to make sure that we’re doing the right thing for the right reasons.”
I don’t know how that wouldn’t disarm somebody because it’s very authentic. It is vulnerable, but it also shows that you are in control of yourself. That you are within the power to present in a way that is going to be beneficial. I loved your example. Thank you for letting us bring it up. I know you’re not through it yet, so we’re done.
It’s okay. It’s a real-life example of what I deal with in my role. Like I said, that is a tiny percentage of what I deal with. A lot of what I deal with is fun and exciting. It’s making these relationships and connections. It’s positive, but there is this other side to it. As you said, it’s the hard side, the darker side. That’s realistic. In my mind, I always remind myself no matter how well I get along with someone, I can always see that other side, too.
We talked a little bit about your past. We talked a lot about today. We talked about the future. I want to go back to your past. You have an audience of students. You’re Rams. Go Rams. They’re going to be tuning into you. You told me the most hysterical story. I was like, “What? What are you talking about?” Let’s go back to the younger Jessica. You were a little bit of a rebel. You’re a tough cookie and a little bit of a rebel. You survived. You somehow got yourself out of VCU with a degree. Do you want to share that?
I can definitely share that.
Find joy in building relationships and making meaningful connections, but also recognize the reality of the harder, darker side—and never forget it’s always there. Share on XMom and Dad, I’m so sorry. Your daughter is amazing. No shame being thrown around.
Everything turned out okay. That’s why I could look back and laugh at this. It was my freshman year. It’s honestly totally fitting that it was my freshman year. When I came out of high school, I was not a big partier. I had a very small social circle. When I went into college, I felt like I was in a totally different world.
I was like, “There are so many people.” There’s parties every night. There’s so many opportunities for me to do things that have zero to do with school. For me, I was just like, “How can I get as many of those opportunities as possible?” Again, I had been at home. I’d been pretty, I might want to say, sheltered. My parents let me do a lot. I just had a very small, easy-going high school life.
What happened was that my first semester, I came in with a semester’s worth of college credits. I’d already done all my AP classes. In retrospect, I wish it was a good thing because my freshman year, I did not do well at all. I got in trouble. It was a hodgepodge of difficult things. Not only was I not being consistent in showing up to class, which was horrible, but honestly, it’s my truth.
I was not going to class consistently. I was not being a great student. I was not reaching out to home a lot, to be honest. I was happy with my freedom and my independence. On top of that, I had a good friend group. I had this pressure because I was so new. I wanted to be liked. I was like, “I’m going to do stuff that I probably wouldn’t usually do.”
It’s not part of my character, but I was trying to fit it. One of those things was that we were all out shopping at a local mall nearby. A couple of my friends were like, “I want to buy A, B, C things.” I said, “I don’t want to buy this. I’m going to just take it. I’m just going to put this in my purse and leave.” Mind you, I was at Macy’s. I had no idea that Macy’s had same-sex security guards that were able to see if you were taking something from a fitting room.
I was very not in the know about how they operated. Everyone’s like, “How did you not know that?” I did get caught when I left the department store before I left the mall. Unfortunately, they actually made the comment of, “This is not that big a deal, but because you’re in X County.” Which at the time was Richmond County.
They were like, “We are going to be a little tougher on you because we don’t like this type of stuff in this particular area.” I shared with Tina that I thought because I was eighteen, it was going to be expunged from my record fairly quickly. That was not the case. I had to go through it. To be honest, it was mostly just the civil charges that my parents dealt with. It was a very horrible experience.
My parents pulled me that semester and said, “You need to come home.” They took me out of VCU and said, “You come home. You go to GMU. You do a semester. Let’s see how you do. Let’s see if we can give you back the independence you had at VCU because we don’t trust you to be there.” I was truly embarrassed that I had done something bad.
To me, I was like, “Why would I ever do that? That’s not me at all. What was I thinking?” When I came home to GMU, total 180 degrees, because I ended up on the Dean’s List that semester. I went from literally flunking and being a partier vagrant. I was like, “I am on the Dean’s List at GMU.” To me, it’s a blip. To be honest, it was a very eye-opening experience for me.
That sobering experience was not expunged until when?
To me, I just want to forget that. Honestly, after it happens, I want to pretend like that never happened.
Sorry. Here I am saying, “Jessica, let’s relive it.”
It’s okay. It’s been a long time. Like I said, I feel like I have a lot of perspective since then. When I got out of college and I was looking for my first jobs, Keller Williams did not have any background check stuff. It was fairly easy to get through but DR Horton was my next job. At that time, I was like 24-25. I was just at that range. They did a background check. I told them, “There’s nothing. I don’t have anything on my background.” I had been under the impression that it would be expunged after four years. I was like, “There’s nothing left.” It turns out it was a longer period than that to get expunged for my record.
Are you clear?
I am clear. I didn’t come up on the Drees one, which was funny. Even still, I proactively told Drees. I did do something back in because I was worried it might come up again. With DR Horton, the worry was I didn’t bring it up. They said, “We did find something on your background check.” Again, I felt the same embarrassment level. I didn’t even know that that was going to show up. We had to do an explanation letter. They were very understanding.
When you told me this story, we were laughing about it a while back. She gave me permission to bring it up again. This is not shame or shade at all. What I loved about your explanation is there was a lot that you learned from that. You turned yourself around very quickly. It wasn’t even who you were to begin with.
You were trying to just fit in. You had way too much independence. I tell even my own kids, “If you are privileged enough to go to college, then there are three things that are happening at college. One is you’re getting an education. This time, you get to choose what it is you want to study. Hopefully, you’re choosing something cool.”
“Two, you are there to establish your independence in a little bit of a protected bubble, like a snow globe. You got campus security. You got all these people that are doing very similar things to you. Everybody’s there for the student. Third, it’s to develop your network.” By the way, my freshman year, I was a great student in high school. Freshman year just like you.
I’m Asian-American. There was a lot of emphasis on grades. I got straight A’s. I go away to my campus and I was like, “Parties, what’s going on? This is so awesome.” I got a little out of control focusing on what I was there for, which is to study and to understand things. I’m not innocent in that either, but you got through all of that. Even for us parents, and now that you’re a parent, we survive these things.
I can’t believe it. My parents handled that so well. Thinking about having to deal with that with my daughter, I don’t know how I would react. I don’t know that I would have been as calm as them. They were the right level of strict. “We’re disappointed” without being over the top in a reaction, which I appreciated.
I already had so much shame around it anyway. I felt bad. I don’t feel like that anymore, by the way. That’s why I can talk about this experience because I don’t feel that anymore. I do look back on that experience and say that was just a poor decision. It’s nice to have that perspective. It’s a lesson in just trying not to be extremely hard on yourself. A mistake doesn’t doom you for life in being able to have successful careers. It’s okay to make a mistake. At the time, it was horrible.
Don’t be so hard on yourself. One mistake doesn’t define your future or your ability to build a successful career. Share on XWe all live in glass houses. I love the fact that you’re able to share. We’ve done the past, present, and future. I’m curious, if you could leave our audience with your own mentorship moment. What are some of the things that you would like to share with the younger version of yourself coming up through college and moving forward? What are some of the pearls you’d like to share with them? What would you like to tell yourself? You’re twenty and still at VCU. You are a Psych major. You have no idea what you’re going to do after school, but you like Psychology. What would you tell your younger self?
Probably one of the most important things for what I do, which is why I feel like I’m successful. It’s one thing to learn, be smart, and to have a lot of knowledge, just general knowledge. You get at school and you get exposure to lots of stuff. Something that I didn’t lean into as much back in college that I feel like would have been helpful was just the networking aspect.
For me, I did not realize how integral my relationships would be as I continued to grow in my career. I didn’t realize how much honing that skill was important. I was always a naturally more extroverted person. It was easier for me generally to be like, “I’m going to go and strike up a conversation or make a friend or talk to somebody, even though I feel a little uncomfortable.”
I have realized that that is also a learned skill. You can learn in situations. You can still be an introverted person, but you can learn to be like, “I’m going to put myself out there, even if it’s a little uncomfortable.” The more you do it, the more comfortable you get. I wish when I was in my twenties, I had been able to do that more. I found a lot of excuses for not doing certain things. That’s one thing.
I was a huge perfectionist in my twenties. I felt like things could only be done one way. If I didn’t do it and one little thing went wrong, it was a failure on my part. What I’ve learned is that the things that have not gone perfectly and that I’ve had some failures on have been huge learning successes for me in the long-term. I’ve been able to take away something from that.
Again, there used to be that feeling of, “I feel guilty. It didn’t go the way it was supposed to go. I feel bad that the outcome wasn’t what I thought it was going to be. I didn’t perform the way that I thought I was going to perform.” I spent a lot of time in my twenties recapping things in my head all the time and replaying things. I said, “I would have done it this way.” I don’t do that anymore. I never do.
No more should’ve, could’ve, and would’ve.
To me, it goes along the same lines of the guilt feeling. There’s nothing to me that’s productive about it. It’s important to have a takeaway from the experience. It’s not okay to have a narrative in your head that you feel guilty. I don’t think that’s helpful. The last thing is that I started at VCU with this idea of having an undergrad in Psych.
At the time, the reason I liked Psych is because it was the understanding of people to me. It was, “How do I understand how people tick?” To me then, “How do I understand myself better?” There was this whole introspective aspect of me picking that. I didn’t know career-wise where I wanted to go. I went a different direction.
If I could look back and try to figure out what I gained from that, I could have brought forward in my twenties. I didn’t start to do this until my 30s. This idea of if you feel your feelings more, you’ll understand them better. If you push them down, you create a space and environment where you think that feelings are a negative thing. I wish that my younger self had realized that my feelings were my superpower. That me being able to understand my emotions in a moment helped me to identify, move through it, and again, be present.
For me, it was always like, “How can I be present instead of be stuck in ruminating on a thought?” If I were back in my twenties, I wish I had told myself that, “Take all that knowledge you’re grabbing from Psych. Remind yourself that feeling feelings, having emotions, and understanding them better is a positive thing. It can be your superpower.” It is because I can do things like taking a pause. I can do things like asking for a moment alone because I know I need it.
Socrates would be so proud. “Know thyself.” Jessica just modernized it for all of us. Jessica Francis, it has been my pleasure to have you on TERN Talks. It was so fun to meet you for the first time. Every time we engage, I just learn a little bit more. You’re doing amazing work in a field that there’s not a lot that looks like you, acts like you. You are making great changes. I wish you the best in your presidency at NVBIA and at Drees Homes.
For those of you from Drees that are reading, you got yourself a great winner here. She’s got a lot of great things ahead of her. For those that are interested in getting to know Jessica, how can we get in touch with you, Jessica? Is it LinkedIn? Is there an email? Is there a social media account? What would you like to direct us to?
LinkedIn’s the best. I check that constantly. I’m doing updates. I do my quarterly presidential letters there if you ever want to hear what I’ve been up to. I put lots of Drees updates and news on land. That’s probably the best. I’ll definitely give you my email as well. If anyone wants to reach out and ask questions, I’m happy to. Thank you for having me, Tina. I appreciate it.
That’s this episode of TERN Talks. We’ll see you in our next episode. Look forward to being a mentor or look forward to getting mentored in your own life. It makes a big difference as we heard on our episode with Jessica.
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