Che Guevara
Life goes on. Now I’m into a whole new genre of reading - teenage grief, parenting grief, general grief, etc…, with no firm timeline of exodus, surety of path or success of endeavor. Times like this is when the habit of reading matters - you can go searching, peeling back the slow wandering thoughts of others.
I just finished the 800 page tome of a book. Searching for the right word, I found ‘tomb’ also works, but is more slang, and means like it sounds - a large heavy ‘and potentially dusty’ object whereas ‘tome’ means large heavy book.
This was that. Both tomb and tome. It had been sitting on my shelf for years, given as a present to me a few years ago - intimidating in its size as well as its subject matter - Che Guevara, the Cuban revolutionary from Argentina. Did I really need to know that much about him?
Once I dug in, I found it very readable, both in the verse and the treatment of the subject matter. I learned a ton about a ton - American policy in South America pre-Kennedy, Cuba’s uneasy and unplanned relationship with both USSR and China, the true ambitions of Che and Castro to spread marxist revolution through each country of South America, the true believer of Che in this effort and the familial and lifestyle sacrifices he made, their efforts in Africa, that the Cuban revolutionaries numbered only in the twenties when they toppled Batista’s Government in the 50’s so on and so on. Very interesting.
My takeaways run both ways - because of all the ‘overwrought communism’ hysteria we’ve been taught was overplayed, it’s easy to downplay the aims and ambitions of Castro and Che. However, hey had every intention of repeating Cuba throughout the hemisphere. The problem of repeating it was multi-fold, and started with the lack of surprise, which was extinguished after Cuba’s overthrow. The fall of Cuba woke up its neighboring states who then fortified their internal defences as well as their intelligence gathering techniques. Three, for whatever reason Cuba’s government was so weak that a few dozen fighters could topple it was both hard to understand as well as hard to replicate in other places.
Lulu basking in the evening glow. She seems to curate her perches thoughtfully.
On the American side, a few things were at play. Long before 1961 and the Bay of Pigs, the US was messing around down there, turning most of the continent into vassal states of big business and American interests. The US’s casino and resort economy of Cuba was just the public face of a ton of interferenc, as it is now, a lot of it provoked by the success of Castro and Che in Cuba. The concern grew from a business interference problem, to a continent-wide Marxist takeover, more of the domino effect you hear about SE Asia and Vietnam. And the US leaders weren’t wrong in fearing what the Che’s had in mind and they got serious about stamping it out.
Of course, this is only one book and one perspective. However it can’t be dismissed like an AI meme since it was 800 pages not 8 seconds. I’m afraid I’m now going to be on a Cuba/South America reading binge, though this topic and books surrounding it also might qualify for my Audible listening, of which I’m quite particular of what gets read and what gets listened to.
Road biking every Thursday.
As an Audible book describes well- “a scruffy handful of self-taught revolutionaries - many of them kids just out of college, literature majors, and art students, and including a number of extraordinary women - who defeated 40,000 professional soldiers to overthrow the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista.” Highly unlikely, but it happened, and was never repeated,
Which reminds me of one of my maxims in my business - just cause it worked yesterday, don’t be so sure it will work today and tomorrow. That’s a trap just waiting to spring.
Business continues as I step up to the plate again, buy 7 pieces of land and take a big swing. Why not? Life is short and with my new all star team, I’m able to make it look easy. Step up and spin the wheel of million dollar speculation - a habit I picked up 23 years ago now. Good to end a Cuba post about gambling, as it was a promising mecca until Castro had his say.
Friday night light season.
Grief. It's a horrible club to belong to - tainted and estranged from the everyday pleasures, whispers and two left feet condolences. I'm not on the very front lines of it but certainly close enough, but for those who are, they carry it around, tangibly, where ever they go. Grief is heavy and loud and slippery and quiet. One minute graspable the next an infection into the soul that no hand-wringing, denials, bargaining or prayers can change.
New day new step
(if you read this previously, please note it's been fixed up - didn't realize it was a shit show editing job).
According the Financial Times, 16% of people picked a book or magazine to read leisurely last 16. 10 years ago it was 28%. Over the last 20 years, it has fallen by 40%. As far as I’m concerned, that’s a real ‘sky is falling’ statistic. Reading is knowledge, reading is empathy, reading is perspective, and reading is power. By reading, you can walk in another’s shoes, you can witness communication, articulation. It builds attention spans and imagination. It’s the wonderment of words.
The rise of social media snippets and the decline in reading means many things, most of the negative; however, it provides an open lane for the young person who does continue the tradition of reading - an easy lane, like showing up on time for work, like putting your phone away while you are at work - it’s an easy lane to gain an advantage.
One thing I’ve always done in my 25 years leading Catskill Farms, and while I can’t remember I’m sure it’s a habit before that - regardless of the situation- I get up and go to work, fulfill commitments, keep on track. What my family is going through currently is just a more significant trauma than hundreds before it, where you get knocked down and you get to decide how to react. I've trained myself to get up and do hard things - it's a muscle, that first needs to be developed, then maintained.
Times like these are where excuses are made - why you can’t pay a bill, why you can’t take a meeting, why you can’t exercise good judgment. Or they are times where you muster the mustard to to take that step forward. The setbacks are endless and continuous, and if you aren’t experiencing them, you aren’t really pushing the limits of what’s possible.
Lulu doesn't 'need' luxury, but she won't pass it up either. In that regard she's a lot like Lucas. Knows comfort when he sees it.
So I’m proud of my son for getting up each day, on time, before the alarm, and getting himself to football and other scheduled events. The day after the death - literally 15 hours later - he pulled himself together and drove to football practice. He argues with me a lot, and sure he is repudiating and rejecting each and everything I’m telling him, but I model good consistent behavior, and he copies it. Parenting is caught not taught, they say, and I’m seeing that first-hand, across the board (except for reading). Both the good and the bad.
For me, the day after the death, I put in a 15 hour old school workday - up at 4:30am, home by 7, and checking progress and emails until I went to sleep. That was more of a ‘keep busy’ type of thing, but even the days following, as the reality crept in and lingered and was there each morning, you go to work. You focus your mind. You take care of business.
MiniBarn run as an Airbnb, very dog friendly.
I think the last post I talked about ramping up the construction schedule of Catskill Farms, and chasing down a bunch of building opportunities and I might have mentioned how much I must have let go through my fingers over the last 12 months, since as soon as I closed up my finger netting, I was catching a lot of fish to feed the large dependent Catskill Farms family. It’s cool, 25 years in, to be able see the ebbs and flows of what I’ve built with a more cool-hand and light touch. Because even what I don’t know poses little risk anymore, since I always have an idea of who to talk to about possible paths to resolution - I have the luxury of time to problem-solve, and I have a steady team to problem-solve, and I have the money to problem-solve. Tackle what I tackled for the last 2.5 decades without those above 3 things in your corner, and you learn real quick the magic of hard work and sticking-with-it and putting in the hours to bounce around from dead end abort solution to dead end aborted solution until the tinkering reveals a lane to resolution.
There’s another secret to really scaling, too - for me, it was humility. Not the type where you-have-a lot-so-it’s-easy-to-feign-generosity-and-humility (traits borne only after the risk of both are gone), but humility in that I truly believed and acted like each house I got sold could be my last.
Could be my last because if it didn’t sell, I didn’t have any more cash. Could be the last because I tried something big that didn’t work. Could be the last because of the economy. Fear is good, and it’s a good friend. Combine that with humility and experience, and you can really create a bullet-proof vest from business mis-direction.
And one of my highlights of the week/month/year, as much as a culmination of my character flaws as well as my vast competitive spirit, a friend of mine has a daughter in town from North Carolina, and she just so happens to be an D1 athlete, and she just so happened to step onto my pickleball court confidently, only to lose a best of 3 match to me in 2 games. I don't like to lose, and I dug deep to pull that one out. So I made a little trophy shrine and of course shared it with them.
John Lust, In Memoriam
To my Good Friend John. We love you.
Until our close friendship ended as collateral damage from a declining relationship with my ex, we were besties. Golfing, skiing, biking, hiking, all over the country. Enjoyed raising my son with him, trusted him as a role model for Lucas. His first death for me was when my ex cut off the relationship - so as much as anything, this reminds me of that painful period, a deja vu of sorts. Trips included yearly sojourns to Stowe/Killington, Big Sky, Powder Mountain, Miami. western NY for a covid golfing trip, and a ton of others. He was always a good travel mate - always low drama, never disappointed, and a good sport.
An obit I wrote for him sums it up well-
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.
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.
