Van Life
Sitting by Lake Moomaw, in western Virginia, one hour west of Lexington VA, south of the Monongahela National Forest, east of the New River Gorge, about 1:30 northeast of Roanoke VA. Took the traveling Van - a 2022 Ram Winebago Travato - out for the first trip. It’s camper van, portable office with a full bathroom, kitchen, sleeps 2 or 3, solar panels, gas stove, microwave, running water, refrigerator, heat, AC and a lot of other bells and whistles. I spent a month plus getting to know the vehicle and learning to the best of my ability how to use the Van. I don’t run much equipment, and this thing has a lot of equipment, completely new to me. I guess once you get the hang of it, it’s pretty leveragable across all RVs and Vans to some extent.
It’s got 110 power, 220 power, it’s got ‘chassis power’ and ‘van power’, its got ‘generator power’ and you got ‘boon docking’ travel (not being hooked up to water and electric) and that’s a lot different then when in a campground with facilities and hooked up directly to power and water.
It’s gone well, and I’m experimenting a lot with all the systems and measuring and monitoring them closely with the modern gauges and electronic dashboards that show the levels of propane, fresh water, solar power, and how full your waste tanks are.
Currently, I’m 40 hours ‘off-grid’ and still have plenty of water and electric.
The real destination is Asheville NC, and the Biltmore mansion and hotel, after riding the Blue Ridge Parkway for awhile - like a couple of days. I tend to travel this way - pick a completely random spot on the map, go there, rough it a bit and then work towards luxury, which I’m sure the Biltmore will have no trouble providing, in between our clay shoots, horse-riding, mansion-touring excursions.
I have Lulu with me and my Friend Anne. Our first stop, after leaving Milford PA was Lexington VA, for the Virginia Barrel Racing Classic, where 2000 girls and women competed for the crown of who can navigate a triangular set up of barrels for the quickest time. 16-17 seconds was the most common, in the 15’s rare, but the winner would have to beat 14.92 seconds, which is darn quick. It was a big event of horse people, horse trailers, dogs, etc…. I’m sure the people on the circuit see each other all the time. Big arena. 4 day event. We had our boots shined.
Out here by Lake Moomaw, this is serious Cracker territory. Strong, almost comical Southern accents among the red-necks - where Appalachia meets who knows what. I’m not judging since I'm a stone's throw from being white trash myself. Basically, guess what I'm saying is there is not a lot of airs being put on out here.
Trying to decide if camping, or more accurately, campgrounds are for me. I like to control my environment, especially of sounds, and campgrounds are a bit of a free for all. You can be stacked right on top of each other, people make a lot of noise with their kids and firewood chopping and TV’s and carrying-ons. We pulled into Lake Moomaw, which is REALLY out there, and right beside us was a family of 4, 2 young kids with 2-3 year old who would not stop crying, screaming, laughing, repeat - but mostly crying and screaming, which is a lot louder in a completely quiet environment - it felt like an SNL skit, and luckily the National Forest campground was not full and we could move our lakefront camp spot to an off lake but quiet space.
Until literally (8) 20-somethings, their baby, and 4 dogs including 2 large German Shepards, poured out of two tiny cars at 8pm as the sun was going down. They had 1 tent, and were as country as country gets but worked as Unit, like a hive of ants, to set up the camp, gather firewood, drinking their soda pop (not a bottle of water to be found), and hang 2 hammocks. The next day there were out at the break of dawn with their fishing rods and women and dogs, and disappeared for the day, only to come back around 5, swim, pack up camp just as efficiently and off they went. Interestingly, to a team manager like myself, I watched, or rather listened to them, and nary an instruction was heard. Everyone knew their tasks, the men worked together hunting and gathering, and I’m sure the women-folk did their part at the campsite. They kept their voices low. And poof, they arrived, they did their thing, and poof, there they went.
The lake is pretty big, so when the only boat on the lake, anchored 150’ off our site (which we returned to after the screaming toddler family left) and had a boat load of joy-loving, screaming kids jumping off the boat in a circular jump, scream, splash, routine that went on for hours, the adults played loud music and swore as casually as a dog licks her ass.
So, yes, it did feel a bit unexpected to arrive at a wilderness campsite and be impacted by humans to such a level and maybe a camera was going to pop out of the bushes and say ‘haha, got you’ for some viral punk stunt, but here we are on day 3, and not a sound to be heard but lakeside birds singing to each other, the soft hum of conversations a few sites over, and the soft smell of someone’s campfire.
I take that back - we seemed to be inadvertently parked under a squirrel playground of tree-scrambling, nut-dropping, squirrel-screeching orgy of activity.
Visiting our neighbor who keeps getting older on us after a health scare.
Great, but not Perfect
I say, and for the most part it is true - that for 20+ years, I’ve woken up and run this company of mine like it’s a start up, just getting off the ground. There is little to no administrative fat in the ranks, there is little to no waste of time, little to no costly inefficiency of poor organization. I wake up every morning breathing fire, and pushing for a productive day. Ask anyone who gets my 4:45am texts.
That was true even as I say that the last few years I delegated a lot of the client-facing day to day operations. There was/is plenty to coordinate beside tile and kitchen selections.
I bring this up because as the business owner who runs their large company like it’s a small company I rarely see something in the business without seeing a way to improve it. We are going through that right now with our marketing, incorporating cutting edge renderings into our marketing efforts of our new homes.
Frankly, it’s amazing what can be done currently in the realm of - let’s call it ‘artificial design”, as in ‘artificial intelligence’ but wow that sounds horrible so let’s try something else, like ‘computer renderings’ (ugh), ‘digital design’ - ummm, that’s not terrible.
What it is is a combination of our stock photos from when we take pictures of houses as we complete them, and a computer-generated enhancement of the photo, as well as the addition of new colors, landscaping, outdoor furniture and other accents on the outside. They can change the large- the colors- to the small, like the color or style of the front door or stone around the porch columns.
On the interior, they can take pictures of a home we built in the past and change the floor colors, the kitchen, the paints, and then add room by room furniture.
The problem that I saw in the past with this stuff is the execution was only fair, and it looked artificial and to me once it looked less than 100% real, then it wasn’t worth doing. But the other week my friend and realtor extraordinaire Erik Freeland showed me a house he is marketing and I was blown away by the digital design of the interior and that opened my eyes as to what is really possible for us.
And because we sell so many houses before they start or make much progress, it’s easy to see how valuable this would be to the potential client, in terms of informing and inspiring them to buy from us.
Our newish employee Jordan comes from a strong design background and has been leading the charge for the digital design of 11 homes - we aren’t talking about what type of fixtures we are using, it is more like ‘what this house could look like’. And I got to tell you, it’s a game changer.
But it’s a game changer for the same reasons it’s always been - I didn’t stop trying to improve our offerings and our process, I know the company well enough to know what still could be improved, and then I insisted on quality when we endeavored on this new initiative. And you can’t neglect the one variable that has always been true - I have good taste and a good eye - I don’t deserve to have either since I don’t really come from any background that would lend itself to that talent, and I never in anyway developed formally that talent, but it is there, and it runs through everything we do - an eye that knows when something is good looking, and aligns with the design inclinations of our clients. You can do whatever you want, but if it is generic, or lacking in pizazz, that does have a measurable impact on it’s impact on the business- our business has always found a lane because our design eye has always been sharp.
But to circle back - even this exercise of digital designing is not done leisurely. I want it done, fast, as well as it can possibly be, and out the door and into production. There is zero value for me in a partially completed project, however awesome it is. There is no time to waste in a startup, and while we may not be that anymore, we still definitely act like everything is on the line, everyday.
To circle back to another point, one of the hardest parts of leading any initiative is truly evaluating what is possible- from a budget vantage, and more importantly, from a talent and time vantage. Seldom, and possibly if ever, have I had the luxury of saying ‘make this perfect’ - ‘go back to the drawing board’, ‘start from scratch’ ‘do another draft’. On the path of many if not all of our initiatives over the last 20 years, there is a hard to accept but critically important aspect of knowing your team well enough to know when you’ve reached ‘pretty good’ and ‘we can live with that’ - where ‘pretty good and done’ outweighs ‘perfect’ - I’m not really talking in construction, but everything else from book-keeping to marketing, to design, to tracking sales leads to fleet management to a million other things we do each day. There is just truly diminishing returns of chasing a level of execution that isn’t available at the moment - you can yearn for it, you can keep it in mind for another day in the future, you can nurse your heartbreak, you can bookmark it, but you got to keep moving, and many times that involves the heartbreak of not a reaching level of finish you were hoping for, but dialed back as other urgent needs require attention, and as you always must, you prioritize and allocate scarce resources in a fashion you see as most pressing.
Mid-Spring Fast Start
A combination of weather, team and effort has allowed us to get a fast start out of the box, this spring of 2023.
I’d say at this point we’ve more or less completed the transition since ‘the departure’. Been a pretty heavy lift and fascinating journey, and my enhanced engagement has benefited both me and the business. I think I’ve said the previous before - but I don’t go back and read my recent previous posts - but it’s true - the somewhat auto-pilot out to pasture posture I had assumed was bad for my mental health as I twiddled my thumbs and only was served up sticky problems to solve instead of sticky problems to serve but also with a healthy dose of positive client interaction.
We have a lot going on - and I can honestly say I don’t think we’ve missed a beat or caused a delay or failed to keep looking forward with the business. Hard to say right now, right in the fog of war, but it seems to me like all is proceeding exceedingly well. And part of the reason for that is that I’m asking, suggesting and demanding more from my vendors and partners. With the previous designer/project manager, she allowed our partners to lean on her for everything, when a fair amount of tasks, decisions and efforts should have been bounced right back to the vendor trying to shirk the task or delegate it back to us. So you take 20 skilled partners, and ask just a little more from them (and in reality no more than they should have been offering anyways) and net benefit to the process is huge. Everyone just needed to grow up a little bit, and do their fair share and maybe a little more.
Another benefit of my enhanced engagement is my team can see up close and personal how much I care about what we are producing - before, I come in, I review, I critique, I move on. Now I’m in the weeds, early middle and late process, and everyone on the team is reminded of why this business is what it is - I know what I’m doing, I have a good eye, and I care. And I don’t suffer fools. We pay our partners good money, and we pay on time. Week after week and year after year.
Currently, we are finishing up Upper Big Sky and had a really good site meeting with the clients on Friday. Few more weeks and that $1.2m house on 10 acres with best in class views will be completed and banked.
We started a house in Copake, NY in Columbia County and it is going really well.
New foundation for a Ranch in Narrowsburg.
2 Ranches in Narrowsburg are more than half way done.
Quarter mile of road being built in Olive for our new 9 lot project, Ashokan Acres, after a year of planning board meetings and negotiations.
2 new small houses (720 sq ft and 500 sq ft) getting started in Narrowsburg.
Big Barn on a lake in Forestburgh continues and is about 60% complete.
Just painted a mural at my office and had the office painted.
Big landscaping project at my home, with new planting beds and all roof water running into rain barrels and being recycled - Pools Open!
And just got elected to my 2nd term as HOA President of my community in which I live.
Been experimenting with drafting our houses, real life renderings, and 3-d walk-thrus, using a bunch of remote workers - some that work out, some that don’t. This should be super neat.
Developing a new product portfolio on the website so people can see what others have done better.
And hiring and experimenting in the office and on the jobsites.
A lot going on. But it feels like the right tempo.
Spring Rain
Wow, nothing complicates my life like 5 straight days of rain in the spring. Well, that’s not true, now that I’m reflecting on it. Having my main wingperson leave with 2 weeks notice, that was pretty complicating. Having a historic flood hit my 4 home single family community, that was pretty complicated. Hiring, firing, buying land, spending a year in front of a planning board - that’s pretty complicated.
So let me rephrase - it’s not as if 5 straight days of rain is the worst disruption I’ve ever seen, but it doesn’t make my life any easier. Lots of rain, no sun.
What this does to active job sites is hard to overstate. And each job site is different, with different levels of access complexity, different types of absorbent soils, better drainage. Each site is at a different phase of construction - for instance our job on the East of the Hudson in Copake NY we are trying to get the foundation in. That involves a lot of men, very heavy concrete and concrete form trucks, lots of access needs. That site has soils that retain water, very heavy with clay. So today, they are going to up and try and get the foundation in. We shall see how it goes.
At Upper Big Sky in North Branch, we are in the final month of construction, with the floors just being finished meaning I want zero mud and dirt in that place and that will be a tall order for everyone to abide and enforce. With the floors finished, tile in, staircase prepped, the last thing you want is dirt and mud everywhere and ground in. It’s a priority this week to avoid that.
We have an excavated hole in Narrowsburg that the masons can’t get to and so on and so on.
The problem is you expect rain this time of year, but this was a lot, and a lack of sun meaning it won’t dry out right away and the problems just aren’t inconvenience - there are safety issues, and there are improvement destruction issues - for instance, you can ruin an expensive driveway by running over it when the base is saturated and vulnerable.
We also have a ¼ mile road going in in Olivebridge NY, but while that may seem like the biggest problem, since we have a lot of rock there as existing conditions, it’s less exposed to damage.
The challenge is to accept the conditions, and make plans based on the reality of the situation. If you can delay something, delay it, even if it’s frustrating. Spring time brings lots of things, and uncertainty is one of them and sometimes you just can’t power your way through.
Update - spent the day or at least the morning running around and getting up to speed, and turns out, while the rivers were high, and their was water running everywhere, all was good, and we actually made good progress all around without retreating too much.
As i drove around, it seemed like I was watching a wrestling match between Winter and Spring - neither retreating, engaged in war, with the outcomes of Today's battles still uncertain. Tragically, and unbeknownst to Winter, the die has already been cast and all efforts to remain are futile.
