Catskills - Sullivan County - Ulster County Real Estate -- Catskill Farms Journal

960.  According to a memory book I just unearthed, that was my SAT scores in 1988.  460 in Math and 500 in English.  That got me into the U of Pittsburgh at the time, and a ton of other schools, which cost me maybe $9000 a year, and most of that was paid for by state and federal grants and the like.

It’s pretty much a cliche that the A students work for the C students and I can see why that is.  Business building is not a linear predictable well-managed path like being a doctor or lawyer or accountant or engineer or finance, etc…  Those professions and many others like it take a lot of smarts, a lot of work, but in the end the path forward is somewhat straight-forward - get these grades, go to these schools, major in these topics, intern at these places, get an entry job at xyz firm doing what is proscribed, and you follow a well-treaded yellow brick road.

Starting and maintaining a business on the other hand, there is nothing linear about it.  It’s sideways as much as forward, truth be told it’s backwards as much as forwards.  It’s about being wrong as much as right, though you do have to get it right when it really matters.  It’s about being comfortable with chaos and uncertainty and stress and the unknowns like the sailors who set off thinking at some point the earth stopped, and was flat.  As a small businessperson, you’re just out there sailing in the big ocean, tacking a course this way and that, navigating the storms, the shipwrecks, shark infested waters.

I do think the one thing that sets the professional path apart from the entrepreneurial is being comfortable with failure, or getting comfortable with failure, setbacks, restarts and catastrophes.  I think a lot of people could never be comfortable with the amount of financial and personal humility it takes to chart a small business course - not grandiose humility, but that bourne from failure and not getting the job done, and being responsible for each and every dumb decision made, word spoken, over-reaction, and counterproductive antic.

And the humility, it’s not like it goes away once you mature out of the super-dumb mistakes made daily - no, as you age up and into a season where perspective is available, then you can just easily sit around cringing at all bad moves over the years.

As I self-evaluate, and I’m pretty good at it, much to my brain’s dismay, I’m able to give myself credit while still feeling the sting of pretty much each and every bad move I’ve ever made.  It’s a little hard to figure out if a more fully evolved human being could have made the journey less tough, but I’m not sure as I look around.  Sure, would I have had to light my way by all the bridges I burn? Probably not, but at the same time literally no one has come close to (regionally) building the business I have, in an area with few labor resources, in areas where what I was doing was brand new. We do a good job, and have gotten better each year, and most if any of my competition over the years has come, gone, and has never been seen again.  I more or less created a market of new homes in the Catskills out of thin air, with an idea and hard work (and Jeff Bank).

I think of all the things that were sort of out of my control that I benefited from, the first must have been the loose regulatory environment I operated in in SuCo (Sullivan County) in 2002-2006.  The cost of entry, building, and small sub-divisions was not very high, either in terms of sophistication needed to do the applications, permits, etc… but also the demands of the permits and planning boards just didn’t cost that much.  That gave a person with no cash and little in the way of experience a chance to execute before the cash sand glass ran out.   What the bank required of me probably would shock most regulators today.

That’s all changed.  I’m currently 3 months of effort into getting a building permit in New Paltz, the town of Rochester is looking under rocks for plants they may want to protect, etc…  It’s just harder, takes more skill, takes more money.

My first home, my first small project, was a subdivision - 3 lots, in the Town of Tusten, circa 2003.  Had to build a road.  Had to clear a bunch of land.  Had to install 1000’ of underground utilities.  Had to build 3 homes.  With no money.  Only a person who really didn’t know what they were getting into would endeavor such a thing, only a person who was comfortable staring out in the abyss of uncertainty, only a person who was ok thinking they could grow 0 (as in $0) into something mathematically possible - typically 0 is hard to grow into anything if I remember my math right, though redirect to math SAT’s so who knows.

But at some point, Farmhouse 1, 2 and 3 were complete, and sold.  The emotion I remember most about selling Farm 2 (which sold before Farm 1) was how little of a dent it made into the debt I was in.  It literally took 8 years to dig myself out of the operations debt I was carrying since my margins for the longest time were thin.  Credit cards maxed out, HELOCs maxed out across several properties, house builds fully leveraged - I lived like that for years.  Now, I just finished pre-ordering my breakfast for Lucas' and I's ski trip out to Steamboat Springs next weekend.

And I think the only reason I squeezed thru was because my personal life was so austere - I lived in a 500 sq ft house with little in the way of amenities, low taxes, no interior upgrades, a trusty 1998 Rav4, an ancient pickup truck.  No fancy equipment, no fancy trucks, no high paid employees, no big trips - just work, and revinvest, rinse and repeat, until one day, one long day after I started, the cash flow turned, and started working for me, compounding and accelerating.  Then Covid hit, and those positioned well really had an opportunity.

But as I’ve said a bunch, just because you were in the right place at the right time (in this instance, outside NYC when everyone wanted to flee), doesn’t mean you were able to maximize the opportunity.  The same old upstate problems existed, ie, lack of labor, lack of sophisticated office help, overwhelmed building departments and utilities - I compared it to being in a boat in the ocean - you may be surrounded by water (ie, opportunity) but it was salt water to most companies, meaning it couldn’t be drunk since the capacity to grow wasn’t there - all Covid meant to a lot of companies was saying NO more often, or worse, getting involved in projects that spelt their ruin.

At Catskill Farms, we maximized the opportunity.  We literally built 20 homes a year for a few years, with me leading from the front on a daily basis - first text at 4:30am, last at 10pm,. Every day, for a few years.  The opportunity teed up a chance of a black swan victory unimaginable as we entered 2020; and as you learn about opportunities in small business, you either take advantage of them, or they fade away.  You don’t get to pick the timing of the opportunity.

One truism that made life a little inside out was back pre 2016, since I was even back then the builder of the most new upstate getaways, it seemed like I was rolling in it long before I was actually rolling in it, and that created a lot of confusion at my actions.  People thought I was long past fighting for survival when in fact I was still right in the midst of it.

So now I’m on the back end of untying a bunch of knots from that go-go period, a series of knots that can only be considered a small price to pay for the amount of risk, effort and construction we did from 2020-2024.  One at a time, taking my time, and undoing the tightly bound knots of business building.

We finished up the project at Ashokan Acres - 9 home in Olivebridge NY.  Everything about that project was both herculean and par for the course, and comes down to the simple idea that I finish what I start.  You can’t do a project like that without kicking yourself for some $$ left on the table, but all in all, just as my finely attuned market sense told me in 2023, this was an opportunity, and I took it.

Barn 56 and Barn 53 have left the building.  

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Sitting in a coffee shop in Lancaster City PA, the area I was born and raised.  Not the city, but one of the many rural farming areas surrounding it.  This is my 4th trip down since Jan 1, because my Son Lucas is attending a football quarterback clinic organized by my high school football guru coach. He was a bit of a maniac back in the day, but that was just the way it was.  Very serious winning percentage wherever he went.

So it’s a bit of haul - 2.5+ hours from Milford PA to Lancaster, and not really that easy of a drive.  Sort of the northeast of PA, winding your way down 209, 80, 33, 22, 100, 222, and Route 30.  We have a routine for this 8:30am clinic; we leave Saturday around 7pm, stop in Reading PA about two hours away at a Courtyard hotel, and then finish the drive off on Sunday mornings with a quick 30 minute jaunt, with a stop at the Park City Diner.  Then 3 hrs at the clinic, and the drive home, in one shot.  

Lucas has been driving some of it, so it’s a good way to put in some road time.  Also a great way to put in some quality Dad time, though on the surface it would be hard to identify the ‘quality’ most of the time, as he pouts, goes quiet, gets upset about something, or otherwise casts shade on me and our relationship.  Tis is the journey of fatherhood, and this is just a season, so I put in the time, stay quiet, crack bad jokes I know will annoy him, and turn his heat seater on high when he’s not looking at every chance I get.

I’m not sure how I missed it, but I totally missed the daylight savings change.  I guess with digital timepieces, you don’t really need to be aware of it anymore.  I was seeing a bunch of those ‘eliminate daylight savings time’ articles that come out twice a year, but I guess I didn’t think it was THIS weekend.  So I was confused at how 5:30am felt so early.  Actually I was surprised that it was 5:30 since after 3am I sleep poorly and crawl through the 3am-5am hours when I finally get out of bed and put the restlessness to good use.  We were at the Diner when we figured it out; I think the waitress inadvertently informed us.

I’m surprised this isn’t a Trump issue along with the NFL new kickoff rules, paper straws and immigration - eliminating day lights saving time.

Lots of uncertainty coming our way in the construction industry.  Tariffs will directly impact the cost of building a home, in ways that are known to be inflationary, but the exact extent of it will be hard to gauge until we are in it.  Looks like we are good through 2025 with our contracts in hand, but we will need to be careful to risk share the uncertainty with our vendor partner and client partners.  I don’t mind challenging conditions - I’m a veteran with a nimble blitzkrieg type of team, so bring it.

Lots of good things all around developing, each one took my full participation mentally, financially and strategically.  Friday we sold our 8th of 9 homes in our Olivebridge project and Monday we sell our 9th.  Another Catskill Farms project sold out.  No one has the track record we do of finishing what we start.  Rinse and repeat, year after year, decade after decade, economic conditions be damned.  I’ve mentioned before that I don’t mind challenging conditions, and I think it makes my job not easier, but more straight-forward, as the competition that springs up during heady times fades away.   This will be my 5th season, so to speak.   I break the seasons down as follows:

1. 2002-2007 - Learning curve with strong sales environment
2. 2007-2011 - No competition, good sales, tough sales environment (but good team building environment)
3. 2011-2019 - Malaise in the marketplace with low margins but steady growth
4. 2020-2024 - GoGo times
5. 2024-2026 - Survival of the fittest.

I put to bed an elongated electric infrastructure problem, I laid the final gravestone of that ligation that distracted me for 2 years, I finalized a few new home builds in the ‘your land our homes’ division, fired and hired successfully across the company, and positioned us for a few years of modest home building engagement.

It’s been a crazy 2 years- but you get up, evaluate the challenges, and tease them apart until you have something actionable. The challenges of the small business gig are never-ending and unpredictable - and the worst part of it is that at the worst moments many times there is an opportunity hiding in there somewhere you need the bandwidth to visualize.

My rental lake house in Fremont NY is entering it's 3rd lease, so that's been a big win in terms of monetizing an asset without selling it and paying the taxes. I'd live there in a second.

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Sometimes it’s just brute force, willing the job to be done.  Spending some money, problem-solving, and attacking.

That’s sort of the situation up in Parksville, just south of Livingston Manor, just north of Liberty.  I live in Milford PA, which is an hour south of said locations, and an hour can make a big difference. Down here in the Sunny South where my son has had hardly a full week of school since New Years, and last week after the ice storm had delays of 2 hours for 4 of the 5 calendar days.

So the brain just assumes that what is true has some resemblance to what is true just an hour north, but no, when I did a site visit the other day, it was still a frozen, icy, lake chilled job site with a foot of snow on the ground.

And because we started building this in early December, caught sleeping a little bit since the fall was so temperate, and then whack, it got cold, and stayed cold.  We were just getting started on the foundation and only needed a week to get it in and backfilled, but a week we didn’t have.  Temps dropped and we reacted with frost and freeze protection for our new footings - hay and tarps and insulated blankets, and waited for the break in the weather that always comes.  And waited, and waited.

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And then we did have a break in the weather with a few days creeping to 50 degrees in early January or so, with some rain, and we thought we were golden until we tried to get our big concrete form trucks to the site on the private driveway and learned that the driveway was never built with sufficient base rock to support large trucks - the rain and frost and thaw and produced the worst conditions for driveways possible, so this resulted in a large 10 ton boom truck carrying form trucks getting stuck and having to be towed out in quite the tricky operation.

And then we waited some more, with the foundation forms in place, covered with tarps, footings covered with hay, large and high piles of dirt freezing and hardening - waited as the temps dropped below zero and stayed there.

The temps would pop into the 20’s or high 20’s which is fine for pouring concrete; the problem was they would then dip into the low teens overnight, or the single digits, and that puts a lot of pressure on the curing period you need for concrete correctly.  You can add additives that help it set up better, faster, but there is still a limit.

This is when it pays to be surrounded by professionals - giving good advice, ready to act and jump at the first opportunity.  That’s one thing, among many, that is true about Catskill Farms - we have professionals at every level that are committed to serve and get it done.  Sometimes it takes speed, other times brute force, other times creativity, many times a combination of all 3, plus others.  And not just the company in question, but then they leverage those attributes to their vendors and suppliers, their drivers, their factors of production.  So to get something like this foundation poured safely in this type of weather environment you have this whole set of direct and indirect relationships participating, from the salesperson, to the desk guy, to the dispatcher, to the truck driver.   It’s not child’s play.

So we get the foundation in, but then they have to strip their forms, they need to boom them out of there, we have to waterproof the foundation, all weather dependent, and needing to be closely managed, since the risk is you push through the weather to the detriment of the house- but we just watched and waited, like a tiger in the tall grass of the plains.  Ready to pounce in these small windows this brutal winter offered.  Big trucks, in tight spots, in sketchy conditions that change hourly.

But we got the foundation in, uncovered and massaged the dirt piles to find the soft stuff and not the frozen layer on top, backfilled around the house the best we could, and let Dean the framer know we were ready - sort of ready.  The basement had a foot of snow in it, and the back porch piers didn’t get in because of the frost in the ground, but still plenty to do.

That’s when things got really interesting - when the temps dropped again, when it was mixed with snow, and worse, ice storms.  When the lake winds whipped up the hill.  And Dean showed up each day, fought off the elements, worked through them, not as quickly, but worked through them, including the coldest week of year with the highs in upper single digits, meaning mornings near zero.

Air guns hardly work, generators struggle, wood creaks and moans as it moves.   The men move like on the moon - slowly and methodically, double checking each step of the way.  I told Dean just to take the week off and we could start again the following week but he chose to keep going - ‘ the guys need a paycheck’ - is his mantra.  

When he was done, somehow the roofer got his roof paper on, protecting the home from further participation, and measuring up for the metal roof, that always gets field measured.

And that’s when the final leg of the relay happens - when my team comes in, shovels the 6” of ice crusted snow off the interior floor decks of the house, encases the basement in plastic - like Dexter, the friendly serial killer - and turning on the heat - coaxing the house dry, melting the snow/ice in the basement, trying to get it melted off so can continue with the putting plumbing in the basement slab and continue with the job.

No editing or re-reading, so if you get here before I go back and do those things, please accept my apologies.

Wow, this winter is now seriously getting annoying.  It has been annoying, but now we have another week of arctic temps, freezing rain, light and obnoxious snow cover.  From my homes in Phoenixville PA the whole way up to Fremont and Parksville NY, just obnoxious.  Really glad I only have a few homes going since progress would have been tough.  I’m tempted to just shut it all down for a week - something I’ve never done - just to let this final week of winter roar through.  In 8 days, it looks like we get some reasonable winter temps.  I got home from Vermont and my entire home and building territory is covered with 2” of ice.  Didn’t think I was going to make it up the driveway.

Up in Vermont, for our 14th or so annual sojourn with a revolving set of family members. Started in 2015 or so in Stowe, and migrated to Killington in 2020/2021.  For the various skill levels of skiers that accompany us, Killington is the better mountain.  More diverse terrain, bigger mountains, less over the top in terms of approach to skiing/resorts, etc…  But expensive - lift tickets for a single can approach $200 for a holiday weekend.  Me, my brother, wingman nephew, Lucas and two of his friends.

It was a tale of two cities up here - Friday and Saturday clear as the eye can see and hardly a whisper of wind. Great conditions with some fresh powder.  Late in the day a predicted storm blew with low visibility and snow, which turned into a ski-able sleet.  Actually a great day of skiing.  We are ski in ski out like ballers do, but up and down Vermont - from Stowe to Killington - driving into the resorts was a nightmare with the snow/sleet coming down, slickening roads, and causing traffic havoc with no solution.  Many people didn’t get to the mountain till lunch or later.  They were calling for the possibility of a major snow event, but the wet sleety snow took a lot of that thunder away.  

But overnight, winds whipped up to 50-6 0mph, rattling our 1980’s chalet to the core.  Lucas and his two friends are hoping to get some skiing in this morning, but I’ll let that up to them to test the elements.  You never know with kids - if they don’t want to let it bother them, sometimes they are immune to it all.  On the same hand, if they want to let something bother them - like being tired when it’s time to study, nothing can be more troublesome.  Since I’m finishing up this post a few days after the weekend, I can report we didn’t ski, and did not have a lot of fun packing up 7 people and a van in high winds and whipping snow.

My son is quite the skier now - but that brings another set of worries now that he's zooming down the mountain at 60mph, whipping in and out of trees and launching off jumps.

I’ve added some team members to the office, which is exciting.  I’ve been searching and seeking on how to reinvent after my main person left 2 years ago.  I scaled up, I stayed the same, I scaled down.  Grew, shrank, rinse, repeat.  The jobs I was looking to fill are good jobs, paid well, serious benefits and challenging in a good way.  Being a small office, the mojo and culture of the place, as well as the person, is important.  Hiring is never easy but one thing that is different this time around is that I know exactly what I’m looking for - with well-defined positions and job descriptions.  It’s tougher than you would think, describing a position at a small business with its fingers in lots of different pies.  Cross-talented, adaptable, learnable. So I’m excited.  Trying to dial in the business to something sustainable to me and my employees without conquering the world everyday.  Working hard to figure out how many houses to build, and other assorted revenue streams, to get to that magic number.

The magic number to me as I ride off into the sunset in yet some undetermined fashion is defined as salaries, fixed expenses, benefits and as important to me as any, the ability to continue to payout handsome 401k matches, profit shares, and even a pension we have.  I’m proud of a lot of things this company has provided to a lot of people, but to spin off profits consistently to me and others in the magnitude of a quarter million dollars a year comes close to topping the list.  It’s pretty much unheard of.

Catskill Farms has always been profitable. Sometimes wildly profitable.  Over the next 5 years, I’m happy with finding that number that allows us to retain employees, create a flexible and hard to compete against workplace, and conjure enough profits to pay our benefits.   I’ve already got 2025 figured out, so that leaves me with over a year to get started on 2026.  One thing Catskill Farms has never been is able to create those profits without me leading daily from the front.  As we pivot a little from the precarious position of building a bunch of homes paid for by my lines of credit, to more client-driven pay as you go situations (much more common), a lot of things are more possible, since the profits on the former are driven by my push and effort and the need for speed, and the profits on the latter is just moving methodically through a building project, which is something we should be able to do.

When you got a gallon of maple syrup from Jeff Bank for Christmas, you take it with you whereever pancakes may be. Have syrup, will travel.

Below, up on the highest peak lodge, brother to right, nephew in background. He's got a puffy check, burgeoning black eye and fat lip from an interaction with a tree.