Cash Flow

Lately, with a combination of today's market and other factors; we are starting to see some builders get in real financial trouble. Seems like in the last month I have heard of a real prominent builder who may pack it in, others who have huge settlements with vendors we use and still more who are just scaling-back with personnell. A lot of these builders are good builders and I wish them the very best, but I can see how these guys get in trouble. When you own a contracting business, a huge amount of cash flows through your business on a weekly basis. It doesn't matter how big you are because it is all relative to how many people and projects you have going. The trickiest part for a builder sometimes is to identify which money is his, and which money is their customers. I know it sounds crazy, but the banks fund on a percentage of completion which means that it doesn't match up dollar for dollar with your expenditures. What can happen is you all of a sudden have a padded bank account as a builder, and you begin to think that you somehow ended up with more money than you thought you would originally on a job. That is not the case. You have to be disciplined and almost put the excess cash to the side, because like many things in life- there will always be a day of reckoning.

Open House

Hey, haven't chatted in a while, sorry about that. One of the reasons is we had an open house that took a tremendous amount of energy the past month. It was a huge success in terms of attendance and interest, and I think it will pay dividends down the road. There were actually two different projects going on- the first was to finish the house, and the second was to simultaneously prepare for a massive gathering and party. I really tip my hat to realtors who do this sort of thing often because it is definitely not easy. We had the event catered, we had door prizes and parting gifts; it was really cool. Thanks to the whole Mattern & FitzGerald team for putting this together. I wanted to leave you with a couple of photos from the event so you could get a feel for it. Enjoy and Merry Christmas!