Employee Retainage at Catskill Farms
As most small employers can attest, recruiting and keeping employees is at the heart of any level of success. We see it among our own team, and we see it among all the teams that support us. Those who find a way to maintain and retain employees are those companies that grow with us, instead of us outgrowing them.
This little mini-barn just got over 500 reactions on Instagram, which was nearly a record. I don't think this was the exact photo - the other one had fog - but for some reason really captured the attention of some of our 6200 followers.
At Catskill Farms, back in 2012, I undertook several initiatives to try and retain employees, and for the most part they've worked well, in whole or part. It's funny how a small self-made business person like myself would be caricatured to be against government programs of any sort - an Ann Rand "I can do it myself' mantra - but I actually have seen the benefit of some of these programs, both State and Federal.
One of the most recent was a testament to the safety net NY State offers with its layers of taxes on everything we do. An employee had a serious and disruptive illness in the family and both his wife and he were able to use the Family Leave Act to take 8+ weeks off at a large percentage of their salary being paid. A real life saver.
While healthcare remains a real mess, I was all for Obamacare though I, as a small business person, was supposed to be the main opposition to the cost and administrative burden, but having lived without healthcare for years, and seeing what a lack of it does to the safety and security of individual families, to me it was a no-brainer, even if it meant more hassle for me.
And 3rd, the 401k Safe Harbor plan for small employers, where we can offer a company match retirement plan has been a huge boon to those who have taken advantage of it (and most everyone does). I think we as a company have stuffed away over $750,000 in direct contributions from our employees, and the associated match from me. In an industry where benefits are few and far between, this type of retirement plan is unheard of, and several of my long term employees are approaching 6 figure accounts.
Vacation, holidays, sick leave, raises, retirement, etc... all work together to create an environment where my valued employees think twice before jumping ship and chasing a few extra short term dollars per hour.
New Homes for Sale In Saugerties
This weekend we are opening the gates again to new clients, which we stopped doing for a while just to ensure an orderly onboarding of a pretty heavy queue of new clients in late spring and early summer. One of the advantages of being in business a while, is you can accurately gauge your capacity, and not wear rose-colored glasses in what you can realistically produce. In fact, with the subcontractor and product supply chain stretched thin, you can expect to produce less, or at least have more trouble and hurdles producing the same, and real trouble producing more.
I remember when I started in businesses in 2002, it was just beginning to be the boom times that ultimately lead to the housing crash of 2007/08. It was tough to assemble a team because everyone was busy, so you had to use the C team (if you are lucky) (and deal with all those scheduling and quality issues inherent in C team product) and pay A team prices. It's frankly easier to start a business in a recession where employment isn't full and vendors have capacity and interest in new clients.
Kacy, my right arm marketing machine, developed a marketing brochure for my weekend land and house pairings/showings. Turned out good.
Our new website has been passing all of our content uploading tests with flying colors, and proved adaptable to most every request and tweak we come up with, so that's a real victory.
https://www.thecatskillfarms.com/for-sale
Amazing moon this morning at 6am. It was one of those mornings that had a bit of everything - crispness in the air, leaves beginning to turn, sun only faintly stirring, and a gigantic big full moon straight-ahead -
The Wealth We Create
I'm astounded at the wealth Catskill Farms generates, near and far. Real estate commissions on our resales, return on investment for our clients, wages to our employees, traffic for our local businesses in a 90 minute radius, tax for schools and towns, interest to banks, premiums to insurance companies, $1m a month to assorted businesses. This might not be a big deal in the scheme of things, but in our little pond, it's more than a ripple of impact.
It's even more pronounced now, in this pandemic era, with more liquidity and sales in the marketplace. Money being made all over the place from our homes, our resales, our marketing. It's eye-popping actually, even for someone like myself who was aware of the fact beforehand.
What causes me to comment is the relisting of one of my homes that I sold for under $460k now being priced at $850k. Sure, there is a pool, some stonework, etc... It's a nice abode for sure, but it's shocking to me on how slim our margins are/were - it's a tough marketplace and navigated it carefully, but now for it's easy for a broad range of real estate related businesses, and frankly, it's a little disorienting.
But not hard to understand for anyone with a basic understanding of economics - stick 500,000+ new people in a marketplace that only had 100 good homes to begin with, and really the real question is, where will prices plateau, since the imbalance is so extreme, and the buyers so motivated.
Catskill Farms Launches its New Website
It's hard to quantify the degree to which our website deletion by the morons at Applied Innovations led by Jess Coburn disrupted our business, but 8 weeks later, we finished the heavy lift on a vision and execution of our new website, that can be seen here at www.thecatskillfarms.com. It turned out great, on many levels, and the idea that it was going to turn out great was by no means assured or guaranteed for a host of reasons.
Nonetheless, it was a huge distraction, and energy suck. My one colleague has not really worked on anything else for 8 weeks, uploading content, and that effort has been augmented by my own daily macro guidance and micro troubleshooting, and on occasion the other 3 people in the office would pitch in, like last Thursday, where we all pitched in.
Of course, for each minute spent on this, there is an opportunity cost of not spending it on something else, be it a client, a sale, a hire, a problem, a solution, an idea.
What made this even more challenging is the fact we were wholly unprepared for it, and a creative exercise like this is typically layered with a lot of brainstorming, branding conversation, directional ideas, visioning, evaluation of what works and what doesn't on the old site, as well as a process for interviewing and hiring a company to handle said task.
As anyone who knows the digital space at all, there are all types of solutions out there - solutions with their own language, their own terminology, pluses, minuses, drawbacks.
I'm an old hand at hiring, which mostly means I know I'm only going to get it right about 30% of the time. With office employees, it's a real disruption when I get it wrong, since it's a small office and the investment in anyone new is pretty large, and the weirdness of having someone in our space is always tough on the culture. With carpenters, I typically just say 'show up, and let's see what you know'. With subcontractors, even if you hire right, there is bound to be miscommunication with anyone new because we have a lot going on and judgement calls are made daily, some right some wrong.
The risk on a exercise like this one - reinventing a space 10,000 people a month visit, a space that defines who you are, a space that is expensive to create - is fraught with challenges, and I'm happy to report we nailed with not just with the vision but with the hire we selected, Steve, from outside London, who we found on upwork.com, a site a client of mine recommended.
How did we select Steve from outside London with live in girlfriend and baby? We put out a query on upwork, and I used my finely tuned ear to find a good match. My colleague Kacy steered me away from some bigger firms who would've wanted to offer more than we needed.
We were trying to update our website, without losing the feel of the site, which is a lot like the feel of our homes - comfy, working, fun, cool, thoughtful, not too fancy, not too showy. It's an improvement on what we had, my old partner of 20 years, a website that was added onto, patched up, greased up, so often it was like a pair of jeans, or boots, or anything else well-loved, and hard worked.
There's a lot more to this story, from a business vantage, that I hope to get to soon.
