Vacation
An early Saturday after wrapping up work, and now I’m off for 2 weeks of a seriously earned and seriously needed vacation out in the Southwest US, after 2 night in the NYC.
I’ve been having some bad luck with my big city timing and hotels - Jacksonville, for the Georgia/Florida annual party/football game, the hotel prices were off the charts, partly because I thought the game was in Gainsville and thus had to book the hotel late after I figured it out. I happened to be in Kansas City when Taylor Swift was in town and normal $125 room was $700 (though I was in town for the beginning of the Kelce/Swift romance), and now going into NYC today, and the marathon is happening tomorrow, meaning rates are top tier.
Took my son to the Fl/Georgia game for his 15th birthday - left on a Friday and came back on a Sunday. All in, over $5000 for plane tickets, parking, hotel, game day tickets (sure we were in the 10 row), eating, souvenirs, river ferry, etc… Not sure when I became the guy who can lay down $5k for a birthday weekend for my first and only son, but I am he. It’s not as gross as it seems - I literally haven’t been on vacation since sometime last year, and our annual sojourn to far off destinations didn’t happen this summer because Lucas wanted to stay local and hang with his friends - so in terms of actual vaca spend, we are well below our average. Hope to correct that forthwith.
Just put away the Van life camper for the winter. Unhooking the hoses from the exterior faucets, putting the plows on the trucks, just getting ready for a winter of unknown ferocity that may or may not be right around the corner.
We listed our first mini micro cottage yesterday and got several offers within hours. That was encouraging, and takes me back to 2007 when these small homes filled a market need. It’s fun revisiting them, tweaking them, making them fun and alive. Unique to the marketplace for sure. Sought after for sure.
We remain busy. I leave the office for 2 weeks after spending most of 2023 restructuring the company which took several effort and several tries, all stressful and time-consuming. But each one resulted in a little more information about what I was trying to achieve. In the end, I more than doubled our office staff with high caliber individuals which should create a better client experience, and create a level of redundancy that was sorely needed. It should also open up some capacity for chasing more leads that we previously let slip through our fingers. It’s also expensive, so need to keep booking business.
So here I come Santa Fe, Durango, Monument Valley, road tripping, and finally Palm Springs CA, filled with spa days, reading works for fiction, hiking, and recharging.
Healthcare
Watching as we see our government prioritizing Israel and Ukraine before healthcare for me and my neighbors is really salt in the wound, especially for a small business, where healthcare benefits are both necessary and an existential threat to the bottomline and business viability. I’m not sure whose business grows at a predictable enough clip in order to pay for healthcare premiums that double every 4 years but if my predicament is any fair sampling, it doesn’t pave the way for restful night’s sleep. It’s frankly ridiculous.
I inhabit, and work in, a rarified space of affluence and wealth, which I have no regrets or guilt about - I know I’ve worked my tail off to get my share and have taken gigantic risks to achieve it. I’m pretty sure my clients haven’t been handed their wealth either. That being said, I also inhabit and work in a space where people struggle with health care, rents, gas, college, homeownership - and frankly, these people are being suffocated by the American Experience. The economic and opportunity boot is squarely on their necks. That’s not the way it used to be.\
Which brings me around to something I noticed with my healthcare now that I’ve used it for the first time the past two years. By ‘used’ meaning I had $6k-$10k of healthcare expenses - last year for my son’s elbow surgery, and this year for my shoulder surgery. 1, it worked pretty well, the mechanics of it, the doctors, the experience. 2, might be a coincidence, or maybe not, but both of these run-ins with the healthcare industry and my health care plan ran up charges that ate up all my deductible, and ate up all my out of pocket, and stopped just short of actually having $1 paid by the insurance company. $8200 - just under, for each of them. And they happened in separate years, so the cost of one didn’t overlap with the cost of the other. In the future, I’m going to try overlap our medical needs more strategically!
Call me paranoid, but it’s hard to think this isn’t somehow a rigged game.
Small homes
We like our small houses, in fact, was ahead of the curve back in 2007 when we came out with our 2 bedroom, counter-intuitive cottage series. Back then, height of the boom, bigger was better. Bigger house, bigger mortgage (lower downpayment!) - bigger bigger bigger. But in Sullivan County, where we only built back then, the sweet spot for pricing was $300k-ish, and so with some savvy market insights that have served me well from day 1 of this entrepreneurial journey, I thought I saw what no one else was seeing - that our NYC clientele didn’t need a big house, in fact, given their druthers, wouldn’t actually want a big house - and nothing right-sized was being built or available.
So, with the help of the Sears Roebuck catalouge of the 1920’s, as well as some studies of other small homes, we came up with some good looking 1300 sq ft homes that we could sell for the $300’s. They were a hit and carried us right through the international real estate collapse of 2009. Our Cottages -
On one of our favorite roads in the Catskills is Lake Ridge Road in Narrowsburg. It used to be lake front lots, but the damn broke back in the 60’s or something so the lake went away. But the lots remained. The challenge of the lots is that they have minimum road frontage - 200’ - meaning an ill-planned house can quickly overwhelm the lot and encroach on neighbors - bad for everyone, bad for values.
So we’ve always stayed modest on our home sizes up there, and no better time than now to reintroduce our mini-cottage homes. Part of the secret of our small homes is we don't skimp on the land, or the components and products we put in the homes - they are smaller yes, but they maintain the same level of care and finish as any of our homes.
Will be interesting to see how the market reacts to these homes - it's been very eye-opening to price these homes, since at lower sales prices you need to be pretty careful about pricing or you can lose your knickers - shit is just so expensive - these homes are literally costing me $75k more to build - or 35% more than the last time I built them.
Post Surgical Venting (and building houses)
I hope it’s not just an illusion, but I think I’m experiencing a slight improvement in mobility, a slight decrease in general discomfort, and a slight uptick in hope that I won’t live forever with a John McCain style useless arm and completely distracting pain. My doctor, a well-known NYC physician, should have let me in on the full scope of this recovery - I know next time before I do anything I'm watching YouTube. That's where all the information is. I mean, I consulted my physician 3 times before surgery and never once did he say 'be ready for a life-disrupting experience full of immobility, pain, intense physical therapy where you earn every 1/4" of regained mobility". That's a lot different than "be ready for a few months of PT".
I often compare this stuff to how I operate - I mean, if a client came to me and asked me for a referral for something - say mold removal in a rental property they bought. Sure, I may be able to introduce them to the GOAT (greatest of all time) mold removal people, but maybe I've seen them downplay the disruption narrative in the past, so it's my job to give my client a little color - 'hey, get ready to be lose 4 months of rent, deal with a ton of indirect but associate dust and cleanup, " etc... If I know this to be true, then my job is to give some color. Our process and what we provide our clients is so superior to what I see out there across a broad array of industries I deal with.
Seven weeks in, and with an improved sense of humor last night with my son and his friend, I managed to look back over the last 7 weeks and wonder how the heck I just pulled off what I did - 4 houses under contract, 4 new hires and training, 3 new foundations in, raise a kid, keep the house going, etc… I’ve stood outside myself on many occasions and wonder how the heck this or that was accomplished but this one really takes the cake in terms of brute force willpower. Sitting at home for 6 weeks was a real choice too for many folks undergoing shoulder surgery. Having a useless arm makes every aspect of life complicated.
One of the toughest parts of this business is the ying and yang of clients. Aggressive, gratitude, reasonableness, unreasonableness, fairness, unfairness, politeness, rudeness, predictability, unpredictability - all in equal spoonfuls, all coming at me at the same time. I feel half the time like Jeremiah Johnson in the Robert Redford western where after he inadvertently disturbs an Indian burial ground, they launch continuous surprise attacks on him year after year that he barely fends off.
It's been doubly apparent since as I rebuild the team, I've been closer than normal to some of the nitty gritty of the requests that come our way, and lets be honest, because I know the miracles we perform, the magic we conjure, the mountains we move for our clients, sometimes the endless quest on their end to perfect every square inch gets a little old.
It's nothing new. It's a tough business, with constantly moving goal posts. It's why I ponder and wonder whether it's a business I'd want my son to join - as a way of life, I'm just not sure the aggravation is worth the glory.
I’ve been realizing it’s the nonsense that really annoys me. Give me a real problem to solve, and I get it. Saddle me with some short bus pissing match over $100 that I have to step in and fix, and that really gets to me since I’m not a kindergarten hall monitor.
On any given week, we are attending to at least a half a dozen warranty issues. I take it serious and we are pretty surgical with it and for the most part I take care of things far in excess of any legal standard, mostly because my team of subcontractors helps me defray the cost in many instances. It's difficult to reconcile the effort we make on the behalf our projects, and the inability to accomplish a simple goal of client satisfaction. I think I have it figured out a bit though, and it's not the greatest epiphany, - it's not gratitude I'm searching for anymore for literally providing one of the most value oriented, seamless design/build processes I've seen, - it's really just the hope that at some point the client will leave us alone and stop asking for more, for free!
I deal with literally hundreds of vendors a month, many for my own home, house, car, pool, dog. I have a great perspective on the lack of ‘meeting half way’ mentality of many many of these companies, and I know that’s not us. We go WAY over the top.
And maybe that’s the point - thanks for tagging along with my writing therapy. Maybe the reward for being so dedicated to the success of our clients isn’t gratitude, but rather success - since it’s clear we are and remain successful and by far the dominate company putting out neat homes all over the Catskills. So maybe what’s going on here is my wish for appreciation for what I know is an outstanding effort is better just measured in my own wealth building and lifestyle, and that of my team.
It wasn’t that long ago, I’d say 5 years max, that most of our clients far exceeded me in net worth, but somewhere along the line, that has reversed. I’m sure my accumulated assets of cash, investments, real estate etc… now dwarfs most of our clients, but what will always be true is I’m a pretty grateful person because of it - I’ve seen the effort I’ve made, inch by inch, day by day, year by year to accumulate generational wealth, and I’m appreciative of the people who participated in that journey. Truly, I get their help in it, I appreciate their help in it, I’m grateful for their help. And I know my efforts changed their lives too.
Mind you, a lot of people I work with - mason, excavators, spray foam installers, tile sales people - are rich, multimillionaires who are experts at their craft and earned every penny. Some of these guys make serious bang - I wouldn't be surprised if my mason makes $3m a year. That's topping most NYC professionals, even in lucrative fields like banking, with much lower cost of living up here. It's weird that the tradesmen are out-earning the clients but that's the case, and also the case for the non-debt non-college route (at least, non-debt college route). You can get a big jump on life if you don't waste 4 or 5 years at a lifestyle college learning how to sit at a desk.
What’s also true is that I’m from a blue collar background so the men and women putting in the work here are not invisible to me - but fully recognized for their efforts, for their talents and for their true dedication. Many of my relationships are hundreds of houses old now, some stemming back 15 years. The problems we have solved together are countless, the seriousness of the problems we have found solutions to are mind-boggling. The bridge my company spans is that of synthesizing the communication talents or lack of with a wide variety of goals from each party, and finding ways to satisfy, engage, compensate to keep this thing rolling. I guess the dirty little secret is my relationships with my large team of professionals and tradesmen, and long tear-filled journey we have walked together, is a lot more important to me than that of my clients - not that my clients aren’t amazing people who have every right to have their expectations met, it’s just that my fellow colleagues in the industry and I have walked in the same shoes and have unspoken appreciation for what we all go through each day.
This isn’t fair the vast majority of our clients, but it’s true enough that I don’t think one of my goals is to have my son enter this highly profitable and enviously positioned organization that he could do quite a bit with - why would I want him to engage a position with so little positive and earned gratitude? I’m actually not blaming anyone - it is what it is- I will continue to recognize and thank the smallest effort made on my behalf, and I think, if I look around, the less I personally get it, the more I give it - and it seems like that is a remedy that works.
It’s a bright sunny Sunday, and in my inbox lies an unending stream of requests, some reasonable some not, each and everyone I know are grenades of varying intensity, never really knowing what explosive result awaits us as we tackle 98% perfectly and can’t do anything about the 2%. I feel like Jeremiah Johnson, with the constant sneak attacks from the natives up in the Montana highlands.
This blog post was written over 2 weeks - in varying degree of pain, with varying degrees of discomfort, with varying degrees of optimism. What is very true, is that it is just a brief moment in time, capturing my perspective for that brief moment, and is probably as much wrong as right. What is also true - what is paramountly true - is our client list is one of the most dynamic, robust, diverse, interesting group of people ever assembled under one brand - that I know to be true. And as I've said many times, my biggest regret of this journey thus far is being too busy to develop deeper more personal relationships with these amazing people
Well, let's be honest - that's only partly true, since every time I try, we end up discussing why the hot water doesn't get the to master bath quick enough, or why the fireplace smokes, or the alignment of the kitchen cabinet, or the size of gaps in between the boards of the wood floor!!!!
I mean, my legacy will dot the Catskills landscape for centuries, and hopefully our aesthetic and style stands the test of time, which I think it will, so 100 years from now, our homes are still admired for their appreciation of modesty, good design, and restraint. 300 homes, across 3 counties, sold the toughest demographic - the NYC professional.
