Back on the Road
With the denouement of the pandemic, I'm back on the road, dragging my son along, and a colleague or two. Amazing it's been 18 months more or less of light or no travel.
NYC, Great Barrington, Killington, and Big Sky Montana. And a big trip planned for end of June, early July.
They say the journey not the destination is the secret, and I couldn't agree more, and that's why we are always in the front of the plane and on the top floors of hotels, courtesy many times of the gigantic amount of miles and rewards I earn by running our large company expenses through credit cards. I'm often amazed that these awards aren't taxed in some way (thank you credit card lobbyists!), even when they are giving you direct cash back, but I'm thankful. I earn enough awards that I feel I have to include them in my estate plans, since the material benefit is real.
I use an assortment of airline cards (delta, united, american), hotel cards (mostly Marriott for the W hotels), reward cards that you can use flexibly (Chase Ink), and even cards like Capitol One, where post-travel you can select to use rewards which I thought was really genius. The hotel and airline cards, especially for higher end travel, has gotten a little sketch in terms of points needed to earn free travel, requiring 2 or 3x what they used to - or as some old timer says somewhere, a million points isn't what it used to be.
The ski trips have been fun - one on the east and one on the west. Really the only thing they shared other than great getaways and time well spent with family was one day was stormy and poor visibility (wintry) and the other day glorious cold blue skys. Both have their attributes. In Big Sky, we got dumped on with 10" of fresh powder between Saturday night and Sunday, which provided a fresh powder experience none of my group had every experienced before and took a little getting used to.
On the business front, we have 4 closings coming up in the next 45 days, and that provides a lot of logistical work for us all. With the end of winter, that creates a lot of phone calls that start with 'hey i hear it's going to be nice out, can we do this or that?"
My job is getting easier
Post covid seems to be here. Even in Vermont, bastion of strict covid rules and masking, is finished with social distancing and masking, with packed ski lodges and slopes mask and safety protocol free. That was eye-opening. My son is even mask free in school, 24 months after masking up. It's hard to remember that only 5 weeks ago, we were running scared because of omicron.
On a business front, i haven't taken a sales call (except for those lucky few who have somehow managed to thread the needle and get me on the phone, or get a return email). I'm burnt out, my team needs a break, and the constant searching for a way to do more gets old. Our team, like many teams, was good before covid and is even better now, and now I'm focused on calibrating just the right amount of work that keeps the pockets flush, the bonuses and profit shares flowing, all 6 cylinders pumps but no danger of overheating.
It's a strange feeling after 24 months of pinned red zone RPM's, to be idling in the 6000/7000 range, able to let off the gas and gun it as needed, knowing what you got under the hood.
At this point, Catskill Farms has become very selective about who and why we work for. It's almost a reserve brand, fully priced, hard to get into.
As part of our employee retainage efforts, I started a 401k employer match safe harbor program 6 years ago. This year I paid out over $100k in matches, bonuses, and profit shares to my 10 person team. I also donated about $15k to local non-profits.
With a clean bill of personal health, post-pandemic business and personal plans ongoing, and a team to be reckoned with, 2022 should resemble 2021 in terms of success, but without all the uncertainty, stress, and fog of war.
That's something to write home about.
OH, Right, this is a blog about homes we build and sell. We sold 2 last week - one in Narrowsburg, Sullivan County and one in Saugerties, Ulster County.
NYC is Back
The last time I was in NYC was just before Christmas when the Omicron was emerging and there were ( mostly exaggerated) reports of a city freaking out. While I may have disagreed with the extent of the emergency being reported, there was no doubt the city was once again on an uncertain footing, unsure of what business and personal disruptive wave was coming next.
I'm here now for a full day preventative health exam offer by Princeton Longevity Center where they scan, poke, insert, flush, inflate and test really every part of your body from brain to heart to colon to bone mass to whatever else that makes our body ticks. It's a bit of a higher end concierge approach to medicine, which I'm all for. On the 71st floor of One World Trade, the views weren't bad either.
It was a beautiful warm day, and masking mandates were being eliminated and it just really felt that at least for yesterday, the pandemic was coming to an end in terms of day to day disruption. And you could feel the pulse quickening the city. And the thing about an event of this magnitude is that the impact and effect/affect on people's psyche is so repressed and buried because they had to continue on with life, raise kids, go to work, keep their marriage strong, and do a million life things with this incredible life danger stress underlying everything, repressed, stiff upper lip. So the idea we may be emerging, not a false emergence like when we got our vaccines, or wore our masks, but a real finality, that type of deep exhale, teary response could be felt.
I think its hard to overstate the stress that has been threaded through each and every person, young and old, for nearly 2 years. Cancelled plans, missed graduations, families separated - it doesn't matter how much money you made or didn't, if you got sick or you did not - the daunting nature of the challenge was real.
So, with jackets off, restaurants full, a less aggressive masking policy, and a bounce in the step, this big city felt good and alive.
I've probably mentioned this before - I think one of the reasons for the robust economy, the inflation and the low joblessness, is because we all got better at what we do, are more efficient, have less rules that don't make sense - Covid disrupted the status quo like few things ever had, and for people in my professional peer group, the challenges we faced and overcame the last two years have made us better at what we do. Sort of like why athletes train with weights around their ankles - makes the ordinary harder, and when you take the weights off, you are faster than you were before with the same effort. That increased productivity is now baked into the economy, in millions of professionals, and each of their more efficient micro decisions and actions have a little more juice to them, resulting in a macro impact on the economy as a whole.
Bake in the time saved with Zoom, remote/hybrid work and a thousand other workplace changes, and we have just lived through a revolution not unlike the industrial, where there was a true leap forward from the status quo.
Turning the page
So it's now beginning of February, and to be honest, January was a shit show. First, everyone got covid, so the ability to get anything done was questionable. 2, the supply chain disruption is real, and now with delivery drivers scarce, getting it is twice as hard. Appliances are coming in in drips and drabs so what used to be a one day affair of careful receiving of said appliances, protecting the floors, installing the next day - a consolidated surgical affair to minimize chances of damage to floors, counters or the appliances themselves - now it's like a 3 or 4 delivery effort as stuff comes in whenever. Not good, not efficient, and hard to control for variables and Murphy's Law.
Last Friday, Ulster County got hit with an ice storm, and power was knocked out, and continues to be knocked out for many, including many of our clients, and even two houses I'm trying to finish and monetize my efforts.
On the sales front I have people busting down my door to get some information and get in line, but I haven't taken a sales call since November, giving both my team and myself a breather. You can't get a breather unless you do a no-exceptions policy - so there are people within the confines of the red velvet ropes and there are those that are not in the door yet. We hope to have a bunch of houses for sale and more than half done so I'm pretty sure they will be a big hit in this marketplace of low inventory and strong demand.
Now that time is on my side, and not so go go go go go go go go, and the team is in place, spending a fair amount of time on self care, across the mental, physical. A particular one of interest, and overdue, is finalizing and checking twice the succession and wind-down plan in case of my demise, or worse in my mind, incapacitation. As the key man who handles a bunch of details vital to the worth and value of my 20 year effort, paying attention of how it would get wound down and preserving as much value as possible is important and logical. Involves lots of planning and the right people in key places with knowledge and training and incentives of how to do it.
Thinking about taking my son on an African safari, then coastal Zanzibar, then maybe Dubai (logically stopping point on the way home from Africa it seems).
