Amanda Leaves the Building
We had our exit party for Amanda yesterday, February 3rd, and it was well attended by her colleagues present and past. My team is an extraordinary group of people. This chapter ends, and next begins. Feels good to have done this right. Now I re-invent, and if the past is any indicator of the future, we end up better.
Speech I made about her service at Catskill Farms, through tears and unsteady voice.
"Well, here we are. Amanda’s last day. Words I really don’t think most of us would ever hear me utter. Amanda was part of the succession plan.
I’m sure I’m not the only employer here who has seen a fair share of burned bridges departures - so despite the mixed emotions and emotional roller coaster I’ve been on for the last 2 weeks, I was and am determined to end this in the fairest, most respectful fashion, and that’s why we are here today.
I invited my son here today to show him how to be graceful in defeat, because make no mistake, no matter the reason for her departure, good or bad, fair or unfair, just or unjust, today is a defeat for me. I have my mother here because she knows the precarious journey this has been since 2001. This is just another marker along the way.
Amanda was my first successful office hire, after years of trial and error. So, in some ways, this is like the first time for me even though I’ve hired and fired dozens if not hundreds of people. I can now agree and attest - the first cut is the deepest.
I also just want to be clear, if I show any emotion, it’s not because Amanda is leaving us, it’s just because I just feel lucky she was here at all. Any emotion is just just a testament to how hard this business is, and how Amanda was by my side during 7 incredibly good and incredibly difficult years. I can’t think of a better reason to shed a tear than to honor her and her hard work. Let’s face it - that’s why we own businesses - so we feel the glory of victory and agony of defeat. Moments when we really feel, that’s why people like me are self-employed. I want those highs and lows - I live for them, painful as they may be.
There’s not a person in this room who hasn’t had my back in some significant way over the last decade - some of you in ways that exceed my ability to thank you enough. Amanda definitely fits into that camp. We play in the big leagues - it’s no joke, with a lot on the line.
Amanda’s accomplishments here at Catskill Farms are legendary and vast, and only with time and distance and other jobs will she really understand what she did here. She created systems for our company and our clients. She managed, wrangled and motivated dozens of vendors and subcontractors, usually men twice her age. She dealt with me day in and day out. She sweet-talked code enforcers. She coordinated and collaborated with our staff and crew. She accepted thousands of deliveries. Picked up the mail everyday. Remembered to take the trash cans out each week. Help me with technology. She juggled dozens of jobs and clients, each with hundreds of details. She navigated the pandemic while juggling dozens of jobs. She literally built 100 homes or more with me worth more than $40,000,000. Her design talents can be seen all over the Hudson Valley. She’s quite literally one of the most recognized designers in upstate New York.
I love teams. Always have played on teams, love building them, tweaking them, messing around with them, making them better. Stress testing them. Practicing, experimenting, working hard together, perfecting. I love being the quarterback, responsible for the whole game and for every win and loss. That’s my lane.
Teams celebrate each other, and I’m here to, and invited you to, help me thank amanda and at the same time make sure everyone in this room knows how much I appreciate the work we do together. We are simply the best around, and it comes mostly from our hard work and ability to work as a team, and our willingness to constantly learn and improve even after 20 years. Some days we are the bad news bears, other days we are like the USA hockey team in 1980 winning the gold medal over Russia. I am really proud of this team standing here. Many of us have worked together for 15 years. Thats a long time in this industry. The bond we share with each other forged thru trial and fire and experience, is a part of teamwork and team-building that can’t be faked, can’t be shortcutted, can’t be rushed. Its earned, inch by inch and day by day.
And Amanda was an integral part of this team all through her 20’s. 7 year is a long time to work for someone in this day and age of job hopping. I fished her right out of college. She May not the quarterback, but definitely an important and pivotal member who played both sides of the ball. No matter how hard I tried it seemed- i just never felt I was giving to her what she was giving to me - even though my accountant disagreed with me. I guess I’ll always feel that any show of gratitude I’m familiar with just isn’t enough for the effort she put out there on my behalf.
She helped me gain wealth. Helped me give money away. Helped me be a good father, steady ex-husband, and just generally helped me improve professionally and personally. She took some of the pressure off of me.
A testament to her impact is the people here today and the uniform praise she is getting as she leaves. As I wrote this up, and then edited to a much shorter version, I was able to reminiscence and savor my long history with Amanda. You could argue at times she held this thing together on her own, just on the strength of her will. She kept the pieces together. She kept my pieces together. I don’t have a lot of people around me that I can bounce things off of, to help me make good decisions - so Amanda’s mere presence each morning when I arrived, as long as she was here, it was proof I was doing something right. That will be missed.
Some of the many words that describe her - hardworking, diligent, honest, kind. Modest. Steady.
For those who have attended our Christmas parties, or pool parties or other company gatherings, this isn’t the first time you’ve heard the only thing coming out of my mouth is gratitude towards Amanda, except maybe that one christmas party in 2010 in Yulan which we dont talk about- Besides helping run this business, she helped me in a million other ways - wrap presents- perfectly of course, helped me run for political office, decorated the office, ran interference, didn’t judge. She had, and has, apparently limitless energy. Limitless problem-solving abilities.
This company has grown a lot in the last 8 years that Amanda has been here - the stability and talents she has brought has helped a lot of us here - have helped us stabilize our respective family status, helped us raise kids, put them in the military or college, has helped us build retirement funds, buy houses. It can’t be overstated the impact of someone willing to come into a leadership position and leave it all on the field, every day for almost a decade. We’ve all benefited from that work ethic. We all benefitted from her consistency. She only has one mode - and that is fully committed, to whatever she is doing. We benefitted from that. I benefitted from that. I benefitted from her steadiness, knowing she was always there to lend a hand.
As many of you may know, She came into this company as an intern, with nary a day on a construction site. Many of you know this story - and as Amanda and I have joked, the story keeps getting better with our embellishments - how her dad saw an article about me in the newspaper when we were building Country Living’s House of the year - and she cold called me out of the blue one summer between college semesters - and I returned her call a few weeks later and said ‘sure, come on in, you won’t last a week but what the hell’. And at the end of the first week, I was trying to convince her that college was for fools and she should just continue working here.
But lets face it, that was never going to happen. Amanda makes good decisions, and those decisions are clear, and rooted in a background and upbringing of strong values and priorities. And that was always clear to me and rang true.
And this company gave her talents the light of day - whatever she wanted to give, the company drank up, and gave she did, and grow we did. Doubling in size, then doubling again, then again and again. Amanda helped me grow as an executive, grow as a boss, watched me make colossal mistakes and win gigantic victories. She watched me fly high and crash right back down. I think it’s true that no person has spent more waking hours with her than me over the last 8 years, and each one has been an honest hour, of setbacks and achievements, of disappointment and success, and always filled with ‘tomorrow is another day’ approach. We really were a team, who knew how to step in and cover for another’s weakness and maybe more importantly, cover for each other’s mis-steps. There was no thinking to it - it was just what we did- it was second nature. There’s no denying this is a tough business, and there is no denying I got a lot of strength knowing Amanda had my back and we could outwork and outsmart any of the problems that dared challenge us. We did it everyday. The proof was in the pudding.
She helped me navigate a divorce, get a kid off to school each day from the office, and all too often did the over and above action - I remember one great example where I needed help getting Lucas to school, a little private school in glen spey, and my 6 year old reported it was pajama day - and they show up in the long line of cars dropping off kids and it with horror no one else in their pj’s, so with a 5 year old in the carseat, she makes a high speed U-turn, drives him 5 miles home, goes into a strange home (mine) finds him some regular clothes and drives him back. She had never been in charge of a kid before. She pulled it off of course. Her quickness on her feet is uncanny. Her common sense is uncommon.
Especially amongst the tradespersons here, there is no one not guilty of taking advantage of her in some way, of being needy and asking for help when you could solve your own problems, giving 90% when you knew she needed and was going to ask for 100%, for bitching and complaining while she fed your families, for not sending her birthday and Christmas gifts to her, and notes of appreciation - when gratitude can be the nutrients that sustain us in this wild world of construction. We can’t demand it of our clients, who god knows should be offering it up freely and in abundance, but we can demand it of each other. We all share responsibility for her departure, because we never stopped asking her for help, which she unfailingly gave. She shielded me from a lot nonsense. She made us all look like our best selves. Her hard work helped us all succeed.
I used to tell a friend of mine, that I just pictured Amanda going home early in her career here, before she got married, and would take her concerns, questions, and problems home with her to the family dinner table each night. I always pictured her going home each day, sitting around a home-cooked meal with her parents, and discussing her day. And getting good advice, not about how to be needy or feeling like a victim, but giving her advice to stay in the game, to keep working hard, giving her young mind perspective on what it means to have responsibility, what it means to work for a hard charging entrepreneur. And she would come back the next day ready to tackle whatever challenge came her way. And understand, for the first 5 years, that meant tackling the the snake of a road over the Eagles Nest each day in her sturdy subaru and nerves of steel. Never late. Never an excuse. She was never a victim of circumstance or other people.
So I propose here today, we honor Amanda’s legacy at Catskill Farms and all the associated people and families who have benefitted from her efforts and her values, by remembering our goal each day we wake up - to put in a good days work, to take pride in our work, to respect each other, and to go the extra mile. As the days turn to weeks, turn to months, then years and decades. We are in this journey together. Like it or not this, today, is an end of an era an end to a big chapter in my life, …but the journey continues. I think I speak for everyone when I say we will miss you Amanda.
If we can do that, dedicate our best selves to our jobs and the efforts they require, then her efforts here at Catskill Farms will last and linger far into the future, as they most certainly deserve, just like the homes she has built for us and some of you.
Gaining her favor after being in business 12 long years was my first real break, helped me stay in the game long enough to find the success that was always just out of reach, just around the corner, and I’ll cherish it long after I’ve moved on from this business. I feel she was one of my first big breaks, after 12 years in business. I feel blessed and cursed for the exact same reason - having such a wonderful person cross my path.
I end - which I hate to do since that means the real end is even nearer than it was when I started this speech- by paraphrasing Captain Woodrow Call’s epitaph for Josh Deets, who had just died after an altercation with the Apache, in one of my favorite westerns, Lonesome Dove (I kept the original spelling).
“Amanda Krupinich Barton - SERVED WITH ME 8 YEARS. FOUGHT IN OVER 100 ENGAGEMENTS WITH FIESTY CLIENTS. CHERFUL IN ALL WEATHERS, NEVER SHERKED A TASK. SPLENDID BEHAVIOUR.”
To Amanda.
