You don't have to be uber rich to give money away. I've felt the tug to give really from the beginning of earning money, even when flush with debt and uncertain prospects.
My guess is over the lastr 20 years I've given $150,000 or more to various people and organizations. There have been successes and failures and they encompass little things like $100 here and there to fire departments and similar, paying for and building dugouts for a little league, non-profits like Sunshine Library in Eldred, anything Tannis Kowalchuk is part of. We more or less paid for the rehab of a Veterans' Home in Liberty NY for a local church (B.A.T.S.), which turned out to be almost a fraud in my books, or at least so little actual assistance to veterans it felt like fraud. There's been local people with health issue, communities with holiday festivities, etc... and so on. We also advertise in local newspapers where the benefit is nearly undetectable to us, other than to support local journalism, a passion of mine. Catskills Center, Ashokan Center, Homeless Federation in Monticello. Giving has always been part of what I do.
3 Years ago, in order to get better advice and be part of a community of giving, I set up a donor-assisted fund with the Greater Pike Community Fund. What they do, through the help of the tax code, is offer an umbrella 501c3, so small fry funds like the Petersheim Fund and others don't all need to have tax code compliance expertise, grant committees, accountants, check writers, etc... It's a great way to reduce the administrative burden, to share it, in a way.
For me, I'm as drawn to the organization as well as the person who runs it.
We've just announced this years grants and they are as follows, sharing $10k of gifts -
GAIT, a place in Milford PA that uses horses for a wide range of therapeutic needs. This is lead by Martha Dubensky.
Ecumenical Food Pantry, which provides a food pantry to NE PA for decades.
A Single Bite, run by the Foster Hospitality Group, and provides balanced meals and education across Sullivan County. This is run by Sims Foster and his wife, Kristen.
Farm Arts Collective, an organization run by Tannis Kowalchuk, which combines theater, farming and creative thinking.
Kyle Pascoe Memorial Fund, which was founded in 2018 after the auto-accident death of a 17 year old, backup quarterback sophomore at Delaware Valley High School
We wish a happy new year to all.
We had the honor and pleasure of selling on of our new farmhouses today, a 3 bedroom 1.5 bath marvel, with a finished well-lit basement that added another 600 sq ft, and a bathroom.
The home sits on 4+ acres, and has plenty of porch and deck to enjoy. We started this home as a spec home, meaning without a prearranged buyer - a type of 'if we build it, they will come' sort of thing. Come they did, and the young couple who purchased it should be pretty comfy in their snazzy little home in Ulster County NY. I mean, these homes are really neat, and you don't have to take my word for it since one could say I'm biased - the marketplace over and over says it when they come back onto the market - they sell quick, they sell for good money. Over and over. The amount of money - realtors, homeowners, contractors, pool guys, gardeners, landscapers, tax collectors - is really unfathomable in its immenseness.
I think my friend Rob in one of my cottages call it the 'economic cross-multiplier' - which I'm sure is a common term for all you hoyti toyti business school grads (or actually grads that learned much in college) - but to me, it was a new phrase that encapsulated what I knew for a fact - that day to day, year to year, decade to decade - that the impact on the economic vibrancy of these towns we work in is, frankly, gigantic.
Congrats to the new owners. Welcome to the 'hood. Sold for the mid $500's, all in, including land, permitting, house construction and basement buildout.
Let me get this argument straight for my own benefit. The same vote that saw the Democrats get smashed country-wide in the House, and gain little in the Senate, and sustained many State and Local Republicans, that same vote, that same ballot, for the President was somehow fraudulently cast? Is that the gist of the argument? Seems weak and non-sensical, and logistically hard to pull off.
But the close races - jeez - Arizona by 10,000 (maybe Trump shouldn't have attacked John McCain), Georgia by 15,000 (maybe Trump shouldn't toned down his racist leanings), Wisconsin, PA. While the overall popular vote was pretty large in Biden's favor, the State's that 'matter' weren't, other than Michigan.
It's a shame this criminal Trump can't celebrate the awesome feat of American Democracy, where 150,000,000 million people voted, and the voted smoothly and waited in lines for hours, and braved a pandemic, and participated in the process by volunteering - on both sides.
Although polling is being disparaged right now, It's actually fascinating to look back on how much good information these candidates had. Trump knew mail-in ballots would raise turnout and that was bad for him (hence post office and legal shenanigans), Biden knew the Blue Wall states of Michigan, Wisconson and Minnesota were critical to his success and also knew Georgia was more likely than Florida. Trump knew it was going to be close, and that the counts would take time, and that would be the period he could sow chaos - so he and his minions prevailed on Republican controlled state legislators in PA and others NOT to change their laws and start counting mail-in ballots early. It's just amazing how these campaigns - Trumps especially - were gaming this out, saw the writing on the walls (suburban women), and used all their levers of power to disrupt it. I mean, who messes with the Post Office? Who actually knew the Post Office could be messed with? There's a genius in that, but nothing to be respected or taught to our children.
It's ridiculous the way some on the right are claiming 'victimhood'. Let's add this up - you have $1,000,000,000 war chest, you have the power of the incumbency which can't be overstated, you have right-wing radio more or less an arm of your campaign, you have Fox News and their commentators, you have all the levers of power to mess with the institutions that keep things straight, you have the bully pulpit and earned media (unpaid news coverage) from your daily press conferences, you have gigantic rallies, you have a motivated electorate, you have a large segment of first time voters coming out, you turn out the vote, and you still lose, and it's the other sides fault because it's rigged?
Because the polls were off. Because the lamestream media didn't give you credit for anything (here's a tip - people you punch in the nose everyday aren't going to be friendly). How sad. It's very clear Trump turned off a fair amount of decent people who couldn't deal with his daily antics and insults, were embarrassed for their children, were tired of Trump being part of their daily lives with his tweets and fights. Although good article in Today's Post about how White Evangelical Christians played a disproportionate part in his turnout - which is gross, since he is clearly the least Christian man who has held that office.
I'm looking forward to Boring Biden, who respects policy, surrounds himself with experts, and puts our Country's needs before his needs. Mostly, I look forward to people like my mom, and there are millions of them, who aren't stressed each and everyday by the unacceptable behavior of their President, and allowing them to return to their lives, to live unburdened by the need to defend or attack on a daily basis behavior they would never accept from a teacher, a friend, a coach or a man of the cloth.
Wow, that was quite the October in terms of political chaos, unexpected twists and turns (Philly shooting, protests, and looting, Pres gets covid, Pres does 18 events in 4 days), but we seem to be on the back side of it, regardless of the tactics of some of the politicians and their media mouthpieces on the right assert.
Took my son and a friend to Philly to see what democracy looks like.
I'm in a position where each and every day I interact with persons across the political spectrum, and what is interesting is I read a stat a week or two ago that claimed that 70%+ of people do not interact or even know someone who is not in their political silo. I don't believe everything I read, and polls are under great scrutiny, but even if it was half that, I would still see it as an astonishing data piece and explains a lot.
I go out of my way to get information from a wide range of sources - magazines, newspapers, news, radio, random apps like tik tok and instagram. Too much information lately, where by the time election rolled around my phone reported a daily use of screen time of 8+ hrs!!!! I don't really know how they measure that - is listening to a podcast screen time? Or a newscast, or call in radio show? I hope so, though I admit I have a newbie energy level for tik tok - guiltfree too, since I think it's really fun, and lack of guilt makes it all the more dangerous. Keep an eye out for my tik tok shuffle I'm working on.
As a builder, in the niche I occupy, I interact with a wide range of persons, as I said above. I sell homes in upstate (rural and red) to the coastal elite (families from NYC and mostly blue), I work everyday with a range of subcontractors and employees (red) and I also work with surveyors, engineers, lawyers, accountants who are educated, many times male and a tad older and harder to pigeon hole into a political generalization (purple).
It's a fascinating vantage point - with a ton of information and preferences and actions coming from all sides. What is true today, if you turn off the news, most people I'm interacting with have moved on, accepted the results, and are now in the process of putting politics back where it always was - white noise in the background, instead of a daily test of how loud can you support your candidate.
Late last week, as the counts were drip drip dripping in, and cable news was doing a great job of narrating the drama when nothing much was happening, I attempted to go news free for a day. When that didn't happen, I tried for a couple of hours. When that didn't happen, I tried for an hour. Waking up in the middle of the night, refreshing my phone, praying for a non-trump headline. Back in 2016, I went to sleep only to wake up, check the results, and was as shocked as the next guy, and not in a good way. Anyways, I finally on Monday started to create some distance between me and the news, and now I'm trying to check in at the end of the day for the Arizona counts, and other stuff. Nothing much changes hour to hour, so for me at least, checking in less is better, and actually just as informative. Not easy though. Everyone has their TV on to the news.
You have to wonder how long Arizona is going to be at 98% counted? They've been stuck there for a week, and you have really get a kick out of Fox News' premature call of that state, since now it is down to 14,000 votes. What a stake through the heart of Trump's election night momentum.
It's like the Trump Show is truly afraid of what comes next for it. How can you make an argument with a straight face of stopping the count in Georgia and PA, continuing to count in Arizona, claiming that the tight races they are losing are fraudulent but not a word about the close races they won, no introspection into last election, just as tight, with voting done with the same rules, but turned in their favor?
You can make the argument because you know your support is wide, and 2 subsets of that support are the following - people with something political at stake, and non-college educated voters, many of whom are drowning in their chosen sources of information, echoing and repeating a small and selected slice of the day's news.
And let's admit it - education matters. Education gives you empathy, perspective, hope, a baseline of comparing today with other days/times.
Also, from what I saw, Trump turned out the vote. I don't have the data, but I wouldn't be highly surprised if first time voters and 'low propensity' voter counts were large and unprecendented. Trump motivated people to vote who don't regularly participate in the political process. I think the trouble there, however, is these people won't continue to vote, won't be regular voters, and will go back to not participating. Their enthusiasm for Trump is not easily transferable to just any state or national candidate. In fact, just the opposite.
A Ranch.
All the problems of yesterday are receding, 4 months into solving them. I can tell by my need to write about them, a process I have always found to help me untangle the issue, and identify ways forward. Now I'm left to solve the 100 regular problems that arise each day. The bottom-line solution is always the same - dig in, sacrifice everything else, work hard and harder, and solve one layer of the issue at the same - the ol' 'a journey starts with a single step'. The sacrifice is always real - in this case, waking before 4am, not coaching, keeping my son out of travel leagues, having little energy left over for life other than work. Each morning I wake now, I slowly can see the extreme nature of the last 4 months, with business doubling, and black swan issues diving from the sky out of nowhere.
Of course, there is another way to - make excuses, fall behind, disappoint vendors/bankers/clients alike, sidetrack your business and lose the momentum which is extremely hard to recapture. We have been on a forward momentum train for 20 years - some times slower than others, but always moving forward. It's way too dangerous for survival to be sitting in one place.
This weekend we are opening the gates again to new clients, which we stopped doing for a while just to ensure an orderly onboarding of a pretty heavy queue of new clients in late spring and early summer. One of the advantages of being in business a while, is you can accurately gauge your capacity, and not wear rose-colored glasses in what you can realistically produce. In fact, with the subcontractor and product supply chain stretched thin, you can expect to produce less, or at least have more trouble and hurdles producing the same, and real trouble producing more.
I remember when I started in businesses in 2002, it was just beginning to be the boom times that ultimately lead to the housing crash of 2007/08. It was tough to assemble a team because everyone was busy, so you had to use the C team (if you are lucky) (and deal with all those scheduling and quality issues inherent in C team product) and pay A team prices. It's frankly easier to start a business in a recession where employment isn't full and vendors have capacity and interest in new clients.
Kacy, my right arm marketing machine, developed a marketing brochure for my weekend land and house pairings/showings. Turned out good.
Our new website has been passing all of our content uploading tests with flying colors, and proved adaptable to most every request and tweak we come up with, so that's a real victory.
https://www.thecatskillfarms.com/for-sale
Amazing moon this morning at 6am. It was one of those mornings that had a bit of everything - crispness in the air, leaves beginning to turn, sun only faintly stirring, and a gigantic big full moon straight-ahead -
It's hard to quantify the degree to which our website deletion by the morons at Applied Innovations led by Jess Coburn disrupted our business, but 8 weeks later, we finished the heavy lift on a vision and execution of our new website, that can be seen here at www.thecatskillfarms.com. It turned out great, on many levels, and the idea that it was going to turn out great was by no means assured or guaranteed for a host of reasons.
Nonetheless, it was a huge distraction, and energy suck. My one colleague has not really worked on anything else for 8 weeks, uploading content, and that effort has been augmented by my own daily macro guidance and micro troubleshooting, and on occasion the other 3 people in the office would pitch in, like last Thursday, where we all pitched in.
Of course, for each minute spent on this, there is an opportunity cost of not spending it on something else, be it a client, a sale, a hire, a problem, a solution, an idea.
What made this even more challenging is the fact we were wholly unprepared for it, and a creative exercise like this is typically layered with a lot of brainstorming, branding conversation, directional ideas, visioning, evaluation of what works and what doesn't on the old site, as well as a process for interviewing and hiring a company to handle said task.
As anyone who knows the digital space at all, there are all types of solutions out there - solutions with their own language, their own terminology, pluses, minuses, drawbacks.
I'm an old hand at hiring, which mostly means I know I'm only going to get it right about 30% of the time. With office employees, it's a real disruption when I get it wrong, since it's a small office and the investment in anyone new is pretty large, and the weirdness of having someone in our space is always tough on the culture. With carpenters, I typically just say 'show up, and let's see what you know'. With subcontractors, even if you hire right, there is bound to be miscommunication with anyone new because we have a lot going on and judgement calls are made daily, some right some wrong.
The risk on a exercise like this one - reinventing a space 10,000 people a month visit, a space that defines who you are, a space that is expensive to create - is fraught with challenges, and I'm happy to report we nailed with not just with the vision but with the hire we selected, Steve, from outside London, who we found on upwork.com, a site a client of mine recommended.
How did we select Steve from outside London with live in girlfriend and baby? We put out a query on upwork, and I used my finely tuned ear to find a good match. My colleague Kacy steered me away from some bigger firms who would've wanted to offer more than we needed.
We were trying to update our website, without losing the feel of the site, which is a lot like the feel of our homes - comfy, working, fun, cool, thoughtful, not too fancy, not too showy. It's an improvement on what we had, my old partner of 20 years, a website that was added onto, patched up, greased up, so often it was like a pair of jeans, or boots, or anything else well-loved, and hard worked.
There's a lot more to this story, from a business vantage, that I hope to get to soon.
Labor Day, 2020.
It's a cool morning, you could feel the drop of temperature a few weeks ago. Still hot during the days, with bright sunny days, but the mornings and evenings reflect the temperate nature of our climate and the wild 35 degress to 80 degree swings a fall day can bring in the Catskills.
The thing about problem-solving is the process you use to solve said problems. Business is, fundamentally, problem-solving (maybe life too, but that's someone else's purview of expertise). And as I have been writing repeatedly, Catskill Farms has been beset with problems. Many of these problems are the result of being busy and building a bunch of homes, and while not readily predictable, you know they are coming in one fashion or another. You might not know when, or what, but you know on any given day, they are a comin'. With these problems, we have a solid set of professional relationships - banking, insurance, surveying, engineering, trade, supply chain, etc..., we can leverage and deploy quickly in order to remedy and solve.
The other set of problems, the black swan problems, pose more of a hurdle, burden, and risk. Typically new and unseen before, typically serious, typically disruptive. Could be key-man/woman employee related, could be pandemic supply chain, regulatory, could be inflation, technology, illness, accident, etc... Could even be your website of 20 years that has been a friend and partner was deleted by the morons over at Applied Innovations.
As the leader of the Catskill Farms, with my hands and brains and backbone still fully employed on a daily basis driving this machine forward, I've been confronted with both. Interestingly, many of the former used to be unexpected and grouped with the latter, but once you confront and solve a few times, they become annoying, distracting, and sometimes expensive, but still not a complete surprise. The black swan events, the new problem (which can be bigger in scale as we grow bigger) poses unique challenges because it's new, there is no roadmap for solving, and typically in a small company there isn't bandwidth just laying around waiting to be deployed to solve a new problem, especially a big one.
Now that I'm on the backside of solving literally a half dozen of 'exact same time' big problems that need to be solved now even though you are busier than ever, I remember how I do so, over the years, developed a process, many times subconscious, of working my way through big problems.
1, you have to believe you have the talent to solve them. 2, you have to give yourself the time to digest and acknowledge the true impact of the issue, 3, you have to accurately measure the damage, delay of the issue even if solved quickly, 4, you have to prioritize accurately, 5, you have to communicate to those impacted if required, 6, you have to solve.
It's like an onion inside of an onion inside of an onion. The collection of issues/problems is one onion, that you have to peel away layer by layer to analyze each respective problem individually. Then each problem is its own onion which needs to be peeled away and solved, with characteristics and problems unique and individual. And with each small success with confronting a layer, the confidence and momentum builds that the individual issue can be solved, and leads to the confidence and momentum that the collection of issues can solved.
It's take time, which has to be found, since it's not typically laying around unused. It takes energy, which is tough since a lot of us are running at full capacity (especially during the pandemic), it takes creativity, which is difficult to summon out of thin air unexpectedly, and it takes risk-tolerance, since the outcome of many proposed solutions are not immediately clear if correct.
Basically, when shit hits the fan, are your instincts and prior lessons learned on point or not? It's the difference between success and failure, delay and progress, redemptive chaos or ship-sinking rocky shore.
Personally, we've used the peripheral chaos that engulfed us over the last 6 weeks to reinvent several aspects of the business, and most rewardingly, found a few employees who either stepped up and flexed skills we did not know they had, or inserted into our company new persons, contractors, etc... who have turned out to be good folks to know.
All the while not missing a step of home production, and future home planning.
The amount of baloney I save my clients from is pretty significant. They really have no idea the brain damage I take on their behalf, protect them from phony contractors, misguided utility advice, long way around simple problems. After I dropped Caroline Akt from my brokerage, I had to finish up like 8 of her deals, and I'm always amazed at how easy repping real estate is compared to what we do. I mean, what we do is tough, and half the time clients are upset at a crooked outlet, and other times I broker a simple piece of real estate (as opposed to what we do at Catskill Farms, which is find land, buy it, develop it, design it, drill wells, clear land, pair it with an owner, get it financed, etc... - it's hard), and I'll go broker a simple piece of real estate and people think I'm a hero. It's just two different universes, in terms of complexity and difficulty, and client expectations.
Here's what greeted me at my small project in Saugerties NY - now mind you, I did what no builder has ever done before, which was write a letter to all 30 homeowners along this street we are building warning them about construction traffic and to be a little more careful with my personal cell phone, and I also posted these signs to keep reminding my team to keep it slow. So someone scratched in some alt words and now it reads 'Report Chuck, Crimes against Nature".
SERIOUSLY! 7am. I'm still laughing at the absurdity of it, since whoever wrote clearly owns a home, has cleared trees, etc... I mean, I've been slapped around enough over the last month, that this was a bit of levity.
And then this - I'm trying to hire a project super for some work in Sullivan County, so this guy responds and I decide to meet him at a project and I can't get a word in edgewise, then he starts talking covid and fake stats, etc... and I say what I think is pretty nicely, "I'm not really interested in talking about that'. and he starts going off about this and that and says "I knew when you wouldn't shake me hand..." storms out of the building, blares out my driveway with a bunch of 'fucks' and 'you' and horn honks, etc... and completes it with this text
"I will blast u in the internet you asshole, like I already heard
Fuck u"
Like I said, I protect my clients from a lot of this insanity. But it's what I navigate to get stuff done. For nearly 20 years.
Here's a farmhouse in Narrowsburg - in contract.
Mini-barn in Narrowsburg, under contract.
Converted and retrofitted 1931 Community Hall in Phoenixville PA, into a single family residence.
Lot clearing in Saugerties. Don't ask, Under Contract.
Actually, maybe the guy has a point. I am a nature menace. But really, aren't we all?
I'm a thinker, I like to toss things around, look at it from several angles, learn, teach, etc... I think the ability to put the shoe on the other foot accurately gives me a real advantage. I don't always wear that shoe in order to empathize or accomodate. Many times the ability allows me find common ground. Many times the ability allows me to navigate the path I've set more effectively. But truly, there are few situations anymore where I can't at least predict accurately one of the several paths the other person may take to my actions.
To do so takes several skills - 1, you really do have to self-acknowledge that not all your actions are beneficent and altruistic - some actions as a businessperson, perhaps most, are selfish. You have to be selfish, for yourself, your clients, your employees, your vendors, etc... 2, you have to acknowledge that priorities among the players of any situation have competing interests, so the ability to navigate your own self-interest while toeing a line of ethical consistency, is important, at least to me.
Which, hilariously, brings us to Caroline Akt's confusion at my irritation at her actions. She seems to be of the opposite ilk, having no ability to see her actions from my perspective. For instance, let's look at her actions, over the last 12 months.
