Ashokan Acres, Sold Out.

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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