Notable Neighbors

Friendly Neighbor, Fabulous Career

To the casual observer, Englewood resident Judy McConnell might be the poster lady for the typical Florida retiree: here for the cold months, perhaps away during the hottest months, quietly enjoying the pleasures of visiting family, relaxing on the beach but not leaving a large footprint in local activities and organizations. 

Well, the casual observer wouldn’t be wrong, just unaware, for Judy McConnell is and has been much, much more than that. How about singer, musician, highly successful realtor, business mogul, world traveler, senior executive of a humanitarian nonprofit and someone whose services at the executive level are still very much in demand.

Judy was born in northern Ontario, the middle child of five girls. Her father, Lorne Krause, was a pastor and her mom Marjori, naturally enough, was a homemaker for such a large cluster of femininity. They encouraged the girls to learn the piano and to sing. And play and sing they did. Judy joined her older sisters, Sharon and Helen, to form a trio that performed before area church groups. “We were very good,” she acknowledges. “I was a soprano, and we sang close harmonies. We all enjoyed that, and so, to this day I can do harmonies.”  

Judy also played the upright bass in her high school band for five years, and upon finishing 13^th grade still in her teens, she auditioned for and won a part in a small musical group out of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. “I traveled with them for just about two years all across the United States,” she says. “The war was on in Vietnam, so we sang at army and navy bases as well as universities, high school assemblies and church gatherings.”  

But her tour was cut short and the trajectory of her life disrupted by a tragic event. “We were in Hyannisport, Massachusetts, and I got a call that my father had been killed in a car accident.” She left the tour and went to be with her mother in Orono, Ontario, just east of Toronto. 

 “I had been planning to go on to college at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma,” she remembers. “I had been accepted there and was to be on their singing team. But I felt in my heart that I should stay to help my mother. It was very hard for her. She was about 47 years old, and Barbara and Brenda were still young.” Judy was 20 years old, Barbara 13 and Brenda 11. “I just filled in the gaps for her living with them.”

There was, however, a blessing that emerged from this life-changing event. Judy “reconnected” with Brian McConnell, a boyfriend she had met at summer camp when she was 13 and he 14. She was smitten then, and though Brian lived some 250 miles from her, the two had stayed in touch over the years. Her family heartily approved of him, and their marriage in August of 1970 was a happy event for all.

 “Brian was a musician as well,” Judy says. “He played the Hammond organ, the piano and the baritone. After we got married, of course we sang together and performed together. When we later became conference speakers, our signature was that after we spoke we concluded with a song together.”

Brian’s first job was in Calgary, Alberta as minister of music for a large church of 1,200, and Judy says, “We also looked after the youth program. We were there for almost three years. Brian produced a weekly TV show, and we sang on TV as well. Every Easter and Christmas he would do large live productions with 100 voices and an orchestra,” with multiple performances over a two-week period. These weren’t paid performances. “Our goal wasn’t to make money,” Judy points out. “It was a huge thing for the church and the community.” 

After Calgary, Brian and Judy were invited to a larger church in Edmonton, Alberta. “At that church we televised our Sunday services live, which is a whole different thing than producing a weekly show. And we sang on that program,” she adds. Along the way, Brian and Judy had two children, Joel and Jessica, but that didn’t slow them down. “Our kids always went with us, whatever we did,” Judy says. In Edmonton Judy had a middle school choir of about 60, and Brian had a youth choir of about 90.

At that time they were living totally on Brian’s income, though they profited from buying and selling their homes in Alberta. They stayed three years in Edmonton, and in 1976 they took a big step in deciding to move to the U.S. “Brian felt he wasn’t really schooled enough in television,” Judy says, and he thought the very active Oral Roberts University television studio might be right for him. Judy was, of course, all for it. Imagine, getting to Oral Roberts after all! On July 6, 1976 they officially emigrated to the United States.

In Tulsa, Brian was now a university student with a wife and two young children, and the young couple had to have some source of income. Judy was determined to find work and help the family out. “I chose real estate, because it’s not a flat salary, and if you put in the time and effort, you can make good money,” she says, “and I was the gal to do it.” Do it she did, in spades. “I sold real estate in Tulsa from 1976 until 1983, and I was a multimillion-dollar producer.”

In 1978, just two years after they had settled in Tulsa, Brian decided he wasn’t getting what he needed out of his course work, and he said, “Let’s just start our own business.” So they created MFE: McConnell Family Enterprises, LLC, based in Tulsa, and it became a global business in a very short time. “What we did was based on the company we partnered with,” Judy says. “The first one we picked was Amway, largely because of the quality of the environmentally friendly products they had,” Judy avers, and they rode on the back of this giant corporation as it broadened its world market reach year by year. Amway had gotten some unwarranted press coverage for their tangles with the Federal Trade Commission, but Brian and Judy found them to be excellent partners. MFE didn’t have to worry about warehouses, manufacturing facilities or product development; they only had to put together sales teams in whatever country they chose to operate in. Within a short time they were operating in seven foreign countries: Canada, Mexico, Italy, Greece, France, England and Australia. “We personally went to each country and set up our own company with our own money,” Judy says. Then they established sales and distribution teams that sold health, beauty and home care products, primarily from Amway’s vast inventory. By 1984 they were at the point financially where they could retire. So they did … for a period of two years. But by then they knew they were too young to retire, and as Judy puts it, “We ramped up again, until the early 2000s, when we calmed down again.” While ramped up they visited more than 20 countries, including Taiwan, the Peoples Republic of China, Hong Kong, Norway, Sweden and Finland.

From 1984 until 2002, Judy served as an executive member, consultant, product developer, sponsor and trainer for Crowning Touch Institute, a professional sales, training and personal mentorship program for women. “We focused on areas such as dignity and self-confidence, personal health and wellness, and developing personal style and image. I’d say we influenced thousands of women and generated millions of dollars in revenue,” Judy estimates.

In 2002, a Tulsa friend of theirs, a church minister who had moved to Moscow two years earlier, said to them, “Why don’t you guys come over here and teach the people in Russia basic business principles? They know nothing.” Says Judy: “We thought about it. We could financially afford to do it, and we were adventurous. We love music and art and travel, and we love people. This could work.” They went over, got an apartment in 2003 and resided there for five years. While there they studied the Russian language and traveled from Ukraine to Siberia. They loved the older French and Italian architecture, the art, the ballet and the music. They deplored the poverty and the poor treatment for young and old folks in need. It is no coincidence that Judy was the Founding President of the 501(c)3 nonprofit, Heart to Heart, Nation to Nation charity until 2018, established for the express purpose of training, mentoring and supplying necessities of life to orphans and staff in the Kaliningrad region of Russia. “I sent them a container full of beds that I got from Wyndham Hotels. I had containers filled with thousands of pairs of shoes for the children, and thousands of towels. The children didn’t have proper blankets, and we sent hundreds and hundreds of quilts and thousands of balls of yarn, so they could be taught to make their own mittens, scarves and hats. And I went over there, many times, a thousand miles from Moscow,” to oversee the program.

Judy gave up her work with Heart to Heart only because Brian became very ill with pulmonary fibrosis, and she needed to care for him. They settled in Englewood in January of 2018, and Brian passed away in September of 2019. 

In the course of their work for MFE, Brian and Judy had met many people of high rank and established friendships with executives in the White House. Brian was co-chairman of the Washington, D.C. Charity Ball for a few years, and he and Judy got to meet Presidents Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush and George “Dubya” Bush and their wives. Judy’s home office is filled with memorabilia from that revered institution. 

But since the year 2010, she has been more involved with a company called MDVIP, with VIP standing for Value In Perfection. “A physician friend of ours in Phoenix was considering changing the style of his practice in preventive medicine, and he had heard of a company in Boca Raton that had a different practice model. He wanted our opinion on it.” It was in essence concierge medicine, wherein a prospective patient pays an annual fee and the doctor agrees to give him enhanced care whenever he needs it. The plan reduces the number of patients the doctor sees but gives him more time with each of them so that he can really help them out with better care. They told their doctor friend it was a no-brainer, and he decided to make the change. “But he told the company in Boca Raton that the only person he would have talk with his patients about the change was me,” Judy says. She agreed to help him for 16 weeks. “About three weeks after I finished this gig with him, the company in Boca Raton called me and asked if I’d go to Palm Springs in California for them for six weeks. I said ‘sure.’ Who doesn’t like Palm Springs?” 

A month later they called Judy again and asked if she’d consider a management position with them. “I asked Brian what he thought, and he said, ‘Honey, you don’t have anything else to do now, so if you want to do it, go for it.’ So I did, and I’m in my 14^th year with them now,” Judy states. For MDVIP, Judy also helps physicians (and their spouses) to transition from their practice to retirement. Many haven’t known anything but the daily routines of their practice (and maybe golf on Wednesdays). 

For her part, Judy has a pretty idyllic existence now. Her daughter Jessica lives a stone’s throw from Judy’s condo, and her son Joel is not far away in Orlando. She loves her life here, the low-key, Olde Florida feel of Englewood, with time out at her lake house in Ontario for a month or two in the summer. She’s thinking of shifting her charitable efforts from the large-scale programs she’s been managing to the smaller scale of Englewood’s nonprofit organizations. 

If she does, you can bet that her footprint will be a large one.