Thursday sure seems like Friday
Playstation 2K (basketball game) against my son where I shot an abysmal 17% and lost by 6, Homeschool, few phone calls, did some work, Toy Story 4, nap, AND ITS ONLY 3:30!!!.
I'm on this new weird food fetish - crackers with jam on them, but the jam is out of this ketchup-like container that had been in the deep recesses of my pantry, discovered anew with all the time I have on my hands.
Tomorrow, we knock out the 3rd home in our 6 home sales sprint. A farmhouse in kerhonkson on 5 acres that we've been working on for 6 months.
Luckily, when this Virus hit, we were on the tail end of a slew of homes. With us, we have production cycles where our balance sheet puffs up with a build out of our assets (homes under construction) and a ballooning of our liabilities (debt used to buy materials and labor to build the homes), and then an airing out of said ballooning as we sell the houses and then it starts all over again. it's a cycle, buy a bunch of land, build a bunch of homes, sell a bunch of homes, repeat.
Just so happened we were at the near end of one these cycles with 2 homes in Narrowsburg and 3 homes in Kerhonkson nearing completion as the virus confinement hit. Far enough along that we could keep pushing them forward through the punchlists, etc... Fortunately, they were in the woods so even a nit-picky building inspector who was taking the Governors lockdown at face value would have to come looking for us. I have a big problem with closing down non-urban, residential, single family construction - it makes no sense, especially when compared with the horror of fast food - where a single team of low paid workers prepare and hand out thousands of meals a day, so if there was someone infected it would spread relentlessly.
So here you have an industry with high wage bread winner/earners, many times outdoors, low density with the employment and health of literally millions of people - and they aren't supposed to work, but then McDonalds, Burger Kings and Roy Rogers can stay open because they have a drive through window. It's just illogical, and makes me feel fine about decisions to keep our show moving forward.
What's happening on a business front is we are concentrating on the homes we need to close, so I can get paid and the clients can have their homes. What we aren't doing is working much on homes that weren't that far along, say sheetrock or prior, so that leaves 6 homes sitting out there waiting for us.
Work out routine.
But, making lemonade out of this lemon is what I'm doing, and finding ways to pivot our energies. One, to rest since I've been driving my team hard for over a year now. Two, to let the cash flow catch and the dust settle, so we can for once actually see what we have - it's always in one door, out the other. 3, we are moving our offices, so this takes the pressure of everything having to happen precisely on one or two days since, hey, tomorrow is just like today anymore.
There's a bunch of things I'm doing, and it should all position us well for the future. Mostly, I'm thinking, thinking about neglected projects, thinking about what the next 6 months look like, thinking about what I want this business to look like over the next 5 years.
postscript - you know you are skating on thin ice when you go to shoot some hoops at 4pm with your kid, and you can't get the door open because you haven't been outside at all yet!
I think I have a crush on
Alisyn Camerota from CNN.