Living in a battleground State & Sold Barn 55

For those whose State is solidly Red or Blue, the 24/7 campaigning we see here in the Swing States is not for the faint of heart.  Television ads stacked one after another, yard signs, trucks signs, mobile offices staffed with loud volunteers.  And most of these States have multiple competitive races, so it’s not just the presidential race.  Here in Pennsylvania, the temperatures are running high and the conversation among us more dispassionate people is which side will be more lost if they lose - on the Trumpian side, his campaign and individual support for it has almost become an almost definition of who they are.  On the Harris side, the loss of faith in their neighbors, friends, community and country will be hard to reconcile.  From an historical perspective, other than climate change, current events really don’t stack up to critical moments in the past - in terms of what’s on the line (slavery, WWII, nuclear war, Vietnam, civil rights, Depression) -, the economy is doing fantastically, - who knows?  Maybe just a lot of noise to keep us at the table, stressed and unhappy.

Having just finished and sold yesterday an amazing house to valued clients in Narrowsburg, NY, I’m definitely benefitting from reduced distraction and a less diffused effort.  I’ve been so busy for the last four years that no amount of work or talent or time was enough to ‘get ahead’.  We got it done, but it was a heavy lift, every day.  Not just for me, but anyone professionally associated with me.  That has come to an end.  In a very good way.  I’m almost having ‘weekends’, defined by consistent time off.  In one episode of the Crown, one of the members of royalty asked ‘weekend, what’s a weekend?’, coming from her perspective of having no obligations in her life that would somehow make one day more fraught with obligations than another day.  I’m the same, but in reverse, I’ve been working 7 days a week for so long that weekends only mean I can do my job in peace instead of while drinking from a firehose of problems to solve (I’m actually not a fan of the ‘drinking from a firehouse’ saying, but its a good one).

I mean, I’m quite good at what I do.  And surround myself with very talented, smart, experienced, problem-solving people.  But when you take that expertise and effort and spread it too thin - diffuse it too broadly - you may not get actual diminishing returns, but you get an existence that is perilously close to spiraling out of control at any minute, as problems - which are always going to arise predictably and unpredictably - need to be solved.  Now that we have decelerated out of the danger RPM red zone and are comfortably revved and running between a noisy 3000-4000 rpms (I’m not a car guy so I’m making this metaphor up right now based on limited expertise), I can focus the full spectrum of my knowledge, relationships and experience and lean into each opportunity, problem, conversation.

For years, I had companies working for us that worked miracles on getting stuff done well, quickly, but it was never enough, never heroic enough, because I kept pressing down on the accelerator, buying more land, designing more homes, getting more homes in the ground, leading from the front, so no matter how skilled we were, how quick, how efficient, we never were fully in control - since that was the tempo I set.

I mean, any moron can take 2 years to build a simple a house, but we never lost our pace of taking about 6-8 months to build a home, no matter how many we had going, and 2024 is going to be our most profitable year yet, and that is compared to some pretty major profitable years.  And considering all the internal staffing turmoil we had as I tried to figure out how to best position the company in the marketplace, the achievement is hard to fathom now that it is complete.  I see these salary reports for surgeons and white-shoe lawyers and veterinarians and I’m just frankly amazed at how I’m 4-10x that at times - it’s pretty crazy, and not living in a high cost place, you can build some real generational wealth.  And this isn't earned by overcharging or sneaky pricing, upcharges or gimmicks - it's a lean operation, with an eye always on efficiency, a business model that demands discipline. We consistently deliver homes for $250 - $400 per sq ft, not an easy thing to do in this market while infusing the homes with a lot of smart upgrades such as spray foam insulation, hardi-plank siding, wide plank floors, on-demand hot water heaters, cable rails and a lot of other options we consider standard. These profits are earned through a serious understanding of the business and product I produce. I know of some builders who charge lump sum times some operating and profit percentage - completely eliminating any incentive to keep prices down - in fact, the opposite, for every dollar one of their subs or vendors charges, they make more money creating seriously perverse incentives even for honest people, which most of these builders aren't. There are certainly situations where this lump sum + makes sense, but building home is not one of them.

So the point is, I got skills, and now I can focus them in on solving problems in a more gentlemanly way, and that allows me the ability to visualize what the next 5 Year Plan of my life could look like- doing what I love (that may be a stretch), what I’m good at, at a clip that is sustainable for my mental health.  I’ve been working hard for at least 3 years at figuring out what a sustainable existence looks like in this business - and I think the answer lies in a tempo where people can succeed without being heroes on a daily basis.  They can succeed because they are good at what they do, and we run an organized shop.

I’m not sure if all the above brings me to my point, since I don’t really have a pre-determined point, but I did want to rehash why I feel we succeed - and it’s hard-wired into me not just out of good customer service but out of a need for survival.

I love the cohesive blues in this home across the paints, cabinets and tile.

So we just finished and sold Barn 55, to a family who relocated up to the Narrowsburg area and enrolled their daughters into a local rural school (and by the reports of it, are really enjoying the new-found way of life).  And I want to compare and contrast, as I mentioned in the last post, about my experience in St Pete’s with a punchout and closing.

We had a closing set, and we had a punchlist and a day or two prior to closing the about-to-be homeowners did a pre-closing followup walk-thru, to ensure the previous punch was completed and identifying anything new - and the reports I got back through the notes of the meeting was that enough of the previous list was still undone, and there were some issues that were important enough for me to understand directly - not 2nd or 3rd hand - in order to deal with them, and this is important - so the Owners didn’t get lost in a communication finger-pointing circle jerk of who knows what.  Punch lists are tough for many reasons, and one of those many reasons is the fact that some issues that appear on the surface to be readily solvable, when you get into them prove to be more complex, and that’s where the real ‘jerk around’ can start because instead of flooding the zone with efforts, the issue keeps getting kicked around.

Without too much internal debate, I had to call up the Fixer, the Closer, and get some real answers, some real solutions, and some real results - and that Fixer/Closer is me.  And it’s that personal investment of time and experience that I’ve always, from day one 23 years ago, leveraged on behalf of my projects and my homes.  So I reviewed the list, called the appropriate vendors, and we met there and went through the remaining issues one by one, under my supervision - meaning no footprints in the house, no stupid parking of work trucks that made soon-to-be arriving vendors jobs harder, no tools on the countertops, no forgetting to put the breaker back on after fixing an electrical issue, no shitting in the toilet.  In the end, in a few hours, prior to selling the home, we had identified, and resolved most if not all and there was zero lost in translation from me to subcontractors to homeowners.  I was acutely and personally and intimately aware of each and every issue.

Now true, one could argue that’s not a good way to grow a business, that delegation is key, and make no mistake, I delegate all day long, but when it comes down to trading off annoying a client with the run-around, or getting in there and bullying each and every factor of production until the problem is resolved to my heightened expectations, I’ll get in there and get it done.  That’s one thing slowing down allows too - the ability to allocate time not in a stressed and anxious manner, but in a thoughtful and patient fashion -big difference.

And to contrast that with my process in St. Petersburg, where I now have 5 different companies who aren’t communicating well and seem to not have one point of authority and accountability trying to punch out a pretty simple punch list in a timely and clear way, where the idea of ‘do no harm’ with site and floor protection seems to be lost on the various characters coming in and out of the Unit, that my rising level of frustration does not seem to trigger any sort of change of process, it just validates how much I care about what we do when compared with a common approach to managing expectations during the process - oh, and did I mention, it’s over a year late being delivered.

What the ‘team’ down there at Reflection, in St Petersburg is putting me through is in stark contrast to the effort we make not to torture our clients.  No one is perfect, and construction is always going to make you look foolish with both avoidable and unavoidable hiccups, but you can strive to mitigate minute to minute how that gets passed to the Client.

Had a fun Halloween party that was a sequel to the Homecoming party and the new game room performed as designed.  My house is a fun party house because while it’s not gigantic it has lots of ‘spaces’ interdependent of each other, so there literally can be like 5 sub-parties happening.  We got the game room, gym, down by the pool, by the fire pit, the screened porch area, the living room and the basketball and spike ball area.  I think we had like 60 kids over and like 25 boys stayed the night comfortably, but I think like I’ve said in the past, the boys in the know stake out their sleeping areas early as well as their blankets so they don’t get stuck using a thin gingham table cloth as did Bill.