It's Christmas, 2025
In St Pete’s for the holiday, with my son and 2 fellow gangbangers from his HS coming down on the 28th. Only problem is the top floor corner unit is really nice and we are outfitting it with fancy furniture so the idea of 3 sticky, stinky, sweaty and smelly teens touching and sitting and laying on everything is not really something I’m eager to experience. There are going to be some rules around here!!
It’s funny to experience the resurfacing after 24 years of being submerged in business building, business sustainment, business rescuing, and business pivoting. It’s strange to think there is another side of life than that day in and day out stress, rush, productivity, uncertainty go go. I don’t even know what that would look like. It would look like an instagram post.
Funny too without even trying I took most of the month December off. That’s a lot of time. It wasn’t really ‘off’ off, but the end of the year just coincided with the completion of a lot of projects, the beginning of the pre-construction on a few, but pretty modest in the actual boots on the ground construction. That translates into a lot of different workload reductions - book-keeping, check writing, inspections, quality control inspections, communications, corralling and managing the subs and employees.
It also translates into a lot of small businesses that I’ve solely supported for years if not decades are seeing a real need to pivot in their business strategic outlook, and I can’t say it’s going to be easy for a lot of them. We provided a safe, profitable home for a lot of them, looked after them, cared about their success, mentored them, assisted them above and beyond the call of duty. Being out there on their own - marketing, chasing work, chasing payments, having the risk in each deal - that’s new, that’s hard, but the writing has been on the wall for a while. I’m slowing down in business, and I can’t be everyone’s daddy forever.
My guess is we will go from $13m to $8m this year, and at least 3.5 of that 8 is stuff I’ve already built and just waiting on the election dust to settle and the new year to begin - a natural reset for people and also bonus time - to begin marketing my 4 mostly completed homes in 2 counties.
As I’m selling off some of my lightly used assets, I get to make a decision down here in St Pete’s for the car I’ll tool around in - the parking garage at the Unit is filled with nice rides, so do I flex and feel good about it or do I go modest hybrid and feel just as good about it? I really like my Son’s new 2021 Hyundai Kona, but I really like my 2018 Mercedes 400. With the sale of my 1972 Malibu, and that sweet sorry that accompanied it, I think I could part with the Benz as well with only cursory pain. It’s sort of like the ‘cutting’ troubled teenage girls do - anything to feel something! Just kidding, that should have been saved for the $500 an hour NYC shrink (actually $550 but who’s counting).
Turns out the battle has been lost - like Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg, Germany’s foray into Russia, Napoleon's defeat wherever he was defeated (my history is a little light there)- it’s clear the battle for people of all ages NOT to have their phones on speaker for all things phone related is lost. People of all ages aren’t even thinking about it anymore- You Tube, Tik Tok, - you name it, it’s now on speaker without a second thought. At first, you knew you were being rude and did it as a way to act out. Now, be it an airport, a restaurant, a bus, a pool - there’s a phone somewhere blasting someone’s topic of choice. I’m a little noise sensitive, and this is worst case scenario for me, but one of my strong traits - learned after one too many quixotic lost cause anti-hero losses - is knowing when to give up, and it turns out now if I want to avoid the random cross noise of competing phones I’ll need to be the one with headphones on - defensive headphone use - seems unfair, and I actually can’t think of another cultural rotation that was so patently inward looking. Among the first worlds, I wonder if it’s just America, or if it’s everywhere. I bet it’s not in Japan.
My son is attending a bunch of QB camps in Lancaster PA run by my HS football coach. Comes full circle.
Speaking of my strengths, my son - who seems to be watching me very closely as of late, and then rapping on all the things I’m doing right and wrong with great wit and thoroughness, a ready roast for any mis-step - says I’m one of those guys that has real strengths and real weaknesses. Really smart and really dumb at the same - he’s not wrong. But, then he ended it with he thinks my smart moves outpace my dumb ones. He says it’s close, but …. That’s a real win for me.
He’s not wrong. My ex used to just look at me and say ‘and you run a million dollar business?” (boy was that a long time ago, both being married and running only a million dollar business- I pocket that now).
Annual dinner party was a ton of fun.
As I watch my St Pete’s building struggle through its punchlist phase, and see what it delivered in many ways not what was promised, I see why I’ve done well. We’ve been committed to a good process, and kept getting better, from the beginning. I’ve literally been serious about delivering a best in class product from the very beginning and have worked for 25 years to deliver it - still falling short and still getting better. That’s a humble mindset that is rooted in and invested in our client’s success. And they’ve been incredibly successful.
Amazingly, I lost a book I was making good progress on. Didn’t lose it - I know where it is - it’s in my seat pocket in the United airplane from Newark to Tampa. I wasn’t even supposed to be reading it - I thought I was starting the Confederacy of Dunces, but instead picked up Confederates in the Attic and it took me 30 pages to figure out why the book was so different than what I thought it was going be (see above paragraph about my strengths and weaknesses - really good example). One is fiction, the other non-fiction, but in the end the mid-90’s study of America was truly pertinent and reflective of current politics - just at the beginning of this trend that led us here - I was digging the study by a good journalist into the enduring impact of the Civil War in the South’s psyche and self-perception - and now I’m going to have to go buy the book in order to finish it, since I intend to finish it.
Queen Diva Lulu.
Merry Christmas from me to you. I can picture all the families in our homes: safe, happy, inspired and living life.