Sunday Morning June Thoughts.

It’s been a wild 9 months of planning and a wilder 3 months of construction execution.  We are literally firing on all cylinders across the whole company - the team is in place and doing just fine.

It’s hard to describe the power of a team in this business.  There are several rungs or circles - you have your employees; you have your subcontractors that while may run their own businesses act for the most part like employees just by the amount of business we throw off their way in terms of coordination and orchestration and communication; you have larger subs where we comprise a measurable but not absolute piece of their business; and you have the vendors and subs where we occupy the standard ‘just a valued client’ position.

We spend upwards of $250,000 a week on goods and services, and there are few if any of those goods and services which don’t require a fair degree of effort on our part to get the job done.  Few things in my world are on auto-pilot.  Too many moving pieces, too much human failability and fragility, too much interaction of people, parts and circumstance - an interplay of Murphy’s Law and what could happen will happen.  It’s not easy; it’s actually downright hard. And 25 years into it, with over 300 homes up and running well, I’m under no illusion as to the price it takes to do my job well and extend the positive legacy of Catskill Farms.

The ‘price’ is measured in many ways.  The cost of the effort - the cost of supervising and tweaking or improving the effort - the cost in time - the personal cost in mental health.  It’s a grown up job with grown up responsibilities and grown up consequences.  The price a person pays for small business survival is a price most people can’t fathom in the slightest.  We entrepreneurs are aliens to the rest of you.

Part of that is because I push.  I push everyday. None of our job sites sit around.  We just finished a 5000 sq ft home 2000 ft off any other road with a complicated utility project, complicated access and a horrid winter.  And we did it in less than a year.  We did it without power to the site.  We did it with day to day site access management.  We did it with hard to communicate directions to the job.  And that was by no means the only thing we had going on.   Some of our clients, for whatever reason, get the immensity of the effort.  Others don’t.  In the end, our efforts seem to get rewarded with our longevity.   I look around at all the players who have come and yes, gone, and there are few examples of those who stick around.  There’s Western Sullivan Properties, but they just copied us with little in the way of shame for doing so - they are putting out some nice houses and seem to be here to stay, but other than that, the number of companies that scaled and stuck around is nearly zero in terms of building new homes for the sales market. 

The “Our Homes, Your Land” idea of 2022 remains just another stroke of my market insight abilities that have powered this company since the first contrarian market thoughts I had in 2002.  My contrarian streak has served me and a lot of other people well in business throughout this journey - 2002, build new when the fad was farmhouse fixer-upper; 2005, build 2 bedroom cottages when everyone else was going big and bigger; 2009, keep building in the face of an international real estate collapse; 2020, put all the chips on the table with land purchases before it was clear that Covid would propel the Catskills like it did.   There’s been a lot more contrarian bets and decisions, and while it’s easy to see the big pronounced ones, the day to day ones - the conversation, pivot, insight, hire, purchase, investment, approach - those are woven into the fabric of each day. I think differently. And that works sometimes, infuriates others, bemuses others and evokes pity from others.  It’s a mixed bag for sure; I’m well aware of it. But it is the secret sauce.

I’m also very well-aware I’ve been using a ton of semi-colons here, which gives me a weird sense of accomplishment because I’m using them correctly. If I can weave in a colon, then I’m really in business.

So the ‘Our homes your land’ concept came from the insight that some, quite a few actually, families who couldn’t find the house they wanted from 2021-2023, bought land thinking it was the easier route, or a viable route.   Then they found out it was hard: hard to get started, hard to get engineered, hard to find a design, hard to get a permit and then even harder to have a successful build.  So they were sitting on land, sitting on land that was then unavailable to me, increasing the scarcity and thus raising the cost of land in general.  So I marketed our ready to go homes, our plug and play homes you can personalize but don’t need to reinvent, our homes that we know how to build and price, our homes that we have worked out the issues.  In sum, our homes that can get you moving forward quickly and affordably and professionally and predictably.

So we are building a lot - 

In Catskill.

In Saugerties.

Another in Saugerties.

In Bethel.

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In Kerhonkson.

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In Callicoon.

In Narrowsburg.

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In Barryville.

In Cochecton.

Each with their own building departments, full-time, part-time, never-time. With their own inspection criteria and priorities and processes.

Lots of personal adventures including a big graduation party at our house for my son's friends who are graduating (he's just ending his jr year but his friend group is heavily weighted to seniors). Really fun and quite large party, that ended by me discovering a puncture in the pool and the water drained 85% of the way and few snakes crawling around in the pool. We went big, with tower lights for the pickleball courts, lots of food, even a beer pong hat (without the beer) apparatus.

Go Big or Go Home.