Pushing through A Very Bad Day

Thursday was A Very Bad Day. This week has been tough as well. Unfortunately I’m having to become an expert in virtually every single thing I’m doing because the ‘experts’ who I hire are completely incompetent in business. Welcome to construction / construction financing / engineering in California. Flakes run the show.

In fact, I’m catching up on my blogging is because since this April Fools Day I’ve been on hiatus while ‘other people’ decide to pull the trigger on my next round of financing.

Whatever.

April Fools Day. What a day to get the final sign-off from the county office for the project.

All of my issues seemed to gain perspective when I watched this guy’s story and listened to the Rich Dad - Poor Dad series creator talk about the resilience it takes in order to make it when, first you’ve made colossal mistakes and second, when everyone around you is criticizing you.

So at least I’m better off than this guy. In a lot of ways, but mainly because I didn’t make the colossal mistakes.

If all I have to do is weather this current storm of boredom and the potential of financial death by attrition, that’s doable. Bring it on…

Saving us from ourselves…

And then there’s this… Bailout backlash - Apr. 23, 2008

“There’s a huge segment of the country saying, ‘We don’t want our money used for a bailout,’” said Brandon.

“A third of the American public rents,” Brandon pointed out. “They’re saying ‘I’ve been saving for a mortgage for years. I could have jumped in on a subprime loan too. Now I’m going to have to pay for a government bailout.”

I happen to be one of those renters who saw this market correction coming, and I’ve been trying to position myself properly for the opportunity.

No, I didn’t go into flipping homes. Although one of my contractor advisors is a guy who did have three or four homes he was in the middle of flipping when the music stopped and everybody grabbed a chair in the California housing bomb.

I wanted to keep on renting when everyone else was buying homes higher and higher. As Kiyosaki said in the clip, the concept of buying in a high market is looking to make money on the ‘bigger fool’. After all, if all your friends are talking about it at the cocktail parties, you’ve just gotta get into it, right?!? Meh.

Thinking of it as a sabbatical from my software, training, and wireless background I decided to work on my strategic side of business in early 2005.

It started with a family project.

Back in 2004 when gas was $2 a gallon, I was researching the soon to be sudden Hubbert’s Peak which we now seem to have slam-danced into. The best part of this construction was that it would be energy efficient, and be an example of a rural wind farm done under $10k.

Below the fold I’ve just got more to say, so don’t go there unless you just have to have the real scoop on how tough the past 18 months have been.

This past year I’ve had the opportunity to live out tough out a project which was entirely outside my field of expertise: building a home. Not only building a home, but building it 500 miles away from my base of operations in San Diego.

Our project in a nutshell - Blended Learning type training in vineyard management combined with a residency program which takes advantage of zero footprint energy efficiency designed into the buildings and wind energy in a zone 4 area. Did I mention the military base just five miles down the road?

For lack of explaining an 80 page business plan, I just call our use ‘rental’ which makes the appraisers and other money guys nod appreciatively.

This was a creative option for improving a 40 acre property gifted to my brother and I by our aunt. The gift had a stipulation: build a house for our father who, at the time was in his late 80s and still very much the Berkeley activist.

Anyone who’s read my About page knows that I had my time of it back in 2001. Getting laid off following an IPO that underdelivered, then having everything go south in the initial wireless data consulting concept when our launch was set for Sept. 11, 2001. Well, we all know what happened on that day in history. Too bad it was also the day CTIA was supposed to launch.

Resiliency. That’s my core value

For the past year I’ve had to deal with people overpromising, and under-delivering, if they deliver at all. In fact, construction is so full of flakes it’s amazing anything ever gets built.

Things started out tough and just got tougher. Property that didn’t just come to us gift-wrapped, we’ve had to do so many improvements for compliance that it just boggles the mind. I still have pictures of what it used to look like prior to 2005. 

Not to mention my dad passing away a year ago after a brutal time of it in the hospitals. Ever since then I can just eyeball any passing nurse and tell you whether they’ll be good at their jobs or not.

Three months before that both my mom’s parents passed away within six months of each other.

Three in one year. Three in nine months, actually.

Meanwhile… back at the ranch…

Property that somehow attracted the strangest and most unhinged Berkeley crowd who felt that somehow they owned it, and attempted not once but twice to put felony ex-cons as squatters onto it.

Confrontations with squatters in the dead of night, pouring rain in January, one with an ex-con with two pit bulls. My private investigation background came in handy. So did the Mossberg 590 I had thought to bring that dark and rainy night, not to mention 911 on speed dial. Nobody got hurt. That’s a win in my book. Well, that and nobody every came back out to squat on the land again. Trouble rides a fast horse.

Like having our subcontracted engineer pull the pin on his boss and catch us and ten other poor homeowners in the frag pattern of his ambitions. He’s on my list of evil people who need to get sued and have their licenses pulled. My complaint’s been filed already.

The rest of the stories. Even worse. They would chill the blood of anyone remotely interested in getting a construction loan. I’ll leave those for telling on long dark winter evenings over beer and wings.

After all of that, having the county approval process turn out to be the easiest part of the situation has been a pleasant surprise. That was no picnic either. Just everything else in comparison was a lot harder.

Lessons Learned

You will hate your contractor. This is something that every single source of information I could grasp about construction gave to me.

So I got creative. I didn’t hire one.

At least not full time. And you know what? Most of my problems and dilemmas wouldn’t have been helped one single bit by having that extra $50k spent on the profit of a contractor.

I’m not saying that I didn’t need advice, but hiring a contractor as an advisor is a lot cheaper.

And I don’t hate him. He’s actually a really great guy.

One last thing. The same basic tenet I try to pass on to my children is that mistakes are okay and even necessary, but not being honest about your mistakes is a sin. Mistakes - I’ve made a few. But the hardest mistakes I’ve had to deal with are the ones that were made by other people which I have had to clean up.