Getting busy...

I buy a lot of stuff, both personally and business.  For business I feel as a whole we are pretty disciplined, personally I guess not so much so but still not terrible.  I know the cost of construction - everything from building permits to framing lumber to all things excavation - the cost of construction is up 40%-50% hands down.  What used to cost $400k now costs $600k.  That I’m pretty used to. Land costing $80k instead of $30 - that's harder to get used to, but I'm trying.

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But what has been shocking me as of late is the daily spends - the coffees that used to be $1.25 at Turkey Hill are 2 bucks, a coffee at a random gas station can be $2.50, used to be 80 cents.  I got a small ice cream cone for $6.50 not a she-she fancy place but a random hole in the wall outside Ellenville.   A fast food ‘value’ meal now costs $12.  The middle and lower classes are bleeding lifestyle dollars and a report out yesterday reported credit card debt is creeping up, and outright skyrocketing among young adults 20-30 yr olds, with micro credit on the rise.  Couple that with new stringent student loan payment obligations and there’s a lot of people hardly staying afloat.

I don’t know why it popped up on my Tiktok feed, but a video of a young woman just realizing she has been paying on her student loan for 3 years with no progress because the interest rate is 18%.  Why it would be legal to offer a 17 yr old who knows nothing about anything a non-bankruptable loan for college is anyone’s guess?

I pay $17k for health insurance for my son and myself.  Then an $8k deductible.   And all dental and vision is out of pocket.  $25k a year for no help from the insurance company.  4 years is a $100k.   The argument for self-insurance is real. The argument that American life is expensive is real. In NY State, it's always been try that there is no case for staying the same size as a business because the costs of regulation, insurance and what have you is high and always rising, so you need to keep growing just to keep up with the bills. The same is becoming true for America in general. There's little room for running in place - you are either losing ground or gaining ground.

The argument that the US dream is split between the 10% who are prospering and the 90% who aren’t can’t lead anywhere good.  The thing is, if you are in the 10%, you typically are hanging with other 10 percenters, so you can become quite oblivious to the stress coursing through the economic veins of this society.

Our compound in Milford PA.

Planning our yearly sojourn to Costa Rica, with a few days beach front, ...

And a few days up in the hills outside Tamarindo.

Wealth is tied up in a few hands.  Robust stocks are limited to 10 companies or less.  It’s a concentrated mess.  I’ve been feeling a nagging sense of doom for years, not necessarily in the general economy or my business but in the stock market and I may be right one day, but as they say, being too early is indistinguishable from being wrong.

Currently, for the first time in a while, I’m out there buying land.  As many as 7 pieces.  With the team in the office, and the veteran field team, I’m interested in another invest and return cycle, rinse and repeat, and see where that leaves us.  Paying $80k for land I used to buy for $30k, paying $450k in construction costs for houses that used to cost $300k, and selling for Mid-$700’s what used to sell for mid $400’s - it's a difficult mind shift.

Definitely less speculators in the game right now, less folks designing and building homes for sale, and our stuff remains interesting, but my marketing machine has been switched off for so long now it’s hard to gauge exactly what’s going on with our stuff, but what is true is that our resales continue to fly off the shelfs.

Recently, I'll post photos later- 

Eagles Nest

Now Maple Lane Farmhouse

We sold our 3 new ones on Wood Oak.

There’s the Ulster County Farmhouse on Hanna Lane that just went up for sale - need to keep an eye out on that one.

I definitely sold my last two on Tetta Lane too quickly, and probably walked away with $250k less in my pocket, but who could have guessed what the market place would foretell, and I’ve always operated under a ‘one in the hand in better than 2 in the bush’ type of mentality.  It’s proved the right method, at least for me.  Gotta keep that cash moving.  Gotta keep the banks from getting nervous when homes hang around too long.  Gotta keep the self-confidence up which gets dinged when a house doesn’t sell immediately (but that’s always a false alarm since I have plenty of room typically to manuever with my pricing).

I'm finding myself in Fremont a lot, where I did a lot of work when I was just starting out in '03. This farmhouse, which was abandoned even back then, is looking worse for the years, like a lot of us.

I have a team in place that took be a long 27 months to put together.  I ran through 9 people in 3 different positions over 2.5 years, overpaying, getting less than ideal results, lowering my expectations, and slowing the business down to a crawl as I fumbled around for the right cocktail of expense, talent, experience, personality and attitude.  We are a small business, with a small office, and I’m pretty demanding and so are our clients.   The only reason we prospered the way we did over the last 2 years - and it has been investment banker level profits - was due to the fact that I was dialed in and I know my business from the ground up - every nut and screw - and I was daily working ‘in the business’ (as opposed to ‘on the business').   

My first SuCo job was painting this barn - seemed so much bigger back in '03. When I accidentally came across it yesterday as I was scouting a new piece of land, I felt like when I do when I go into an elementary school, where everything is kid sized and a lot smaller than you remember it to be.

Working in the business over the last two years has taught me a lot.  Prior to my long-term project manager departing in 2023, I left a lot of the dailys to other people, so I didn’t know how to do a lot of the office stuff, where to find it, how to sign it, send it, package it, stamp it, scan it, print it, save it, find it, file it. I’ve mastered google drive storage and sharing, have no fear of pdfs and longer, can move across multiple softwares and computers.  The one thing I refuse to do is to learn how to use the large format blueprint printer - I guess that’s my line in the sand - if I can’t delegate the large format printing, then I’ve hit the rock bottom. 

My most successful hires have been ones that need a fair amount of training - have the goods, have the starts of a solid skill set, but need the day in day out push and pull of a small business to hone and develop the skills - in a small business, you can’t hide from your successes and failures - they impact everyone, so it’s a great place to accelerate a skill set.  Plus, at Catskill Farms we have our sticky fingers in a lot of pies so it’s always imperative that employees can jump around and develop a varied and fluid approach to problem solving.

And, my management style - as I manage myself - is an annoying mantra of ‘I see you have that pretty much figured out, so let’s move onto the next thing right away’.  Constantly pushing the skill sets to grow, with no end in sight. There's always a way to get better.

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