Strong Foundations

Graham Coe is a builder—literally and figuratively. As Managing Partner at Cityflats, a Kingston-headquartered private equity real estate investment firm, he and his business partner (and childhood friend) Pete Sauerbrei are constructing much-needed multi-residential housing stock in southeastern Ontario. As a boss, he’s setting strategy, creating jobs, and working to cultivate the kind of workplace culture that keeps his growing team engaged and thriving. As a father, he’s building a fulfilled life in a city he loves, consciously striving for a healthy balance of work, family, and health.

And thanks to the Smith Full-time MBA program, he’s doing it all with a full tool belt.

Graham came to the program after years climbing the ranks in commercial real estate, a numbers-heavy career path that had taken him across Canada and to Asia. He was successful but felt a bit stuck: “I reached a point where I needed something to accelerate my career,” he recalls. What he needed were broader business skills and a solid foundation to someday create a venture of his own. An MBA would give him both.

It didn’t take much research for him to set his sights on Smith: He’d grown up in Kingston (and attended high school next door to Goodes Hall), so Queen’s had a personal pull. Furthermore, the immersive format of the full-time program seemed to check all the boxes that mattered most: “I wanted to immerse myself and extract the most out of it, in terms of building relationships with faculty, the alumni network, and the people that I’d be lucky enough to go to school with,” he says.

Upon acceptance into the program, Graham earned a Stephen J. R. Smith MBA Scholarship, which granted him the financial breathing room to leave his day job and relocate back to Kingston for the duration of the program. The scholarship was a major confidence-booster—especially since it came at the beneficence of a Canadian real-estate trailblazer. “Recognition from the scholarship committee and faculty that that my background and experience would bring value to the program meant a lot to me,” he says. “It was very special.”

Graham started the program in January of 2017 and hit the ground running. Some elements of the educational experience felt familiar: Having studied and worked in finance, for instance, he was very comfortable tackling the fundamentals of the curriculum. Others were more of a stretch: Graham chose to specialize in entrepreneurship and innovation, which challenged his brain in fresh and exciting ways. “That type of coursework was totally new to me,” he says. “It was great to interact with instructors and professors, especially those who were past entrepreneurs themselves. I found it fascinating.”

Underpinning it all was the unmistakeable—and infectious—commitment of his classmates and instructors. He recalls the energy of sitting around a table in Goodes Hall with his teammates late at night, hustling to make an assignment the best it could be, and realizing that the building was full of like-minded go-getters striving for the same. “Imagine being surrounded by dozens of incredibly smart and interesting people from all around the world, all of you excited to be there, all of you going above and beyond,” he says. “That’s an experience you can’t get elsewhere.”

As Graham works to grow Cityflats—which he and Pete launched two years after graduating—moments like that are a motivator. It’s just one way his MBA experience informs his day-to-day life. Another? The company often works with Smith MBA students on projects, and provides internships and consulting work to undergrads, too. “I started the program not knowing how I would do,” he reflects. “By the end of it, I’d learned just how much success you can have if you apply yourself and commit fully to something—and how great of an experience it can be.”

Established in October 2015 by Stephen Smith, the Stephen J.R. Smith MBA Scholarship is awarded based on merit on the basis of academic excellence to students entering the Full-time MBA program at Smith School of Business.