Becoming a consumable myself was never the intention of taking over my Homeowner's Association or my wife and I starting our own, multiple individual businesses. I was starting to wonder by this evening, but I checked thoroughly -- there's no clear expiration date stamped on the bottom of my foot.

You see, when you work from home, you tend to work all the time. Many times I've set boundaries, but I'm pretty good at breaking them by taking on more and more volunteer obligations and assignments, and never seeming to quite send that "last email". I keep a pen and pad of paper by the side of the bed because there always seems to be so much that still needs to be done when you're the boss and the employee, no matter what time it is. I can't completely quantify why it was so much easier to get up and leave my desk at exactly 5pm at my old corporate job, but I managed to do it every Monday through Friday, and didn't think once about work on Saturday or Sunday, unless I was simply dreading the return to my desk/prison on Monday.

So I chose instead to "free" myself from their bonds by striking out on my own and discovered I had much heavier chains waiting at home. To quote Samuel Johnson, "The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken." I'm sure my workaholism up to this point has a lot to do with the fact that I feel if any of these businesses or ventures fail, I've failed as well, so my ego is on the line too - raising the stakes just one more notch.

Like any good Darwinian organism, I'm fighting hard to survive and thrive with each 24 hour block I get. I also have a vested interest in seeing my homeowners association grow since I'm the not only president, I'm also the newest resident, and most outspoken. Since my election March 7th, I've held three board meetings (March, April, May). Along with my board, in that short time we have come up with the idea of a new web site and some other ambitious plans, including me meeting each of the 190 individual residents, and a spring BBQ that's just two weeks away. Yes, I'll be the one there cooking away at the grill.

So I am rapidly discovering why when you try and make a difference in a large group, it requires a great deal of energy and concentrated effort to get the ball rolling in the right direction. Of course, as soon as you overcome inertia, things get much easier. I'm hoping that's where we're headed on all aspects of business and life, but since I'm often pushing the ball uphill in these environments, if you don't hear from me again for awhile, just assume I've been rolled over a few times, or am feeling a bit Sisyphean at the base of a new hill.

Not surprisingly, the last 6 weeks have blown by without me blogging as often as I'd like, even though I intentionally schedule it in once a month. Somehow something more important always crops up and it gets put off, like flossing - we know it's important and good for us, but we still don't always do it. So when I looked at my calendar this last Monday afternoon after I'd completed teaching an ethics and orientation class at my local real estate board, I was absolutely astounded to find myself with a completely open week.

I blinked a few times to clear my vision. I shook my head from side to side rapidly. I rubbed my eyes even though I've got 20/10 vision and looked again.

Yes, incredibly, aside from an early Wednesday morning Rotary meeting and a 3 hour real estate continuing education class on Friday, I had absolutely no standing obligations and no other appointments set that week. I can't remember the last time I had that kind of open schedule for three days. (Actually, yes I can. It was the week I spent moving to Georgia and I spent three days of my life doing nothing but driving cross country with two cats and three dogs - don't ask.) And that is exactly how that week, which at one point appeared so blissfully wide open, the world wide web conspired to consume me entirely.

Strategic planning in business happens only during the downtimes, both natural and scheduled, when the day to day requirements of business and life aren't getting in the way. This allows people to think about the big picture more easily and fluidly, as they are less distracted by never ending to-do lists and not forced to focus on other things outside of long range planning. That's often why those Eureka moments occur in the shower, while shaving, or performing other mundane tasks like exercise.

Businesses and individuals that don't plan, don't survive in the long run, and I was actually looking forward to doing this. Within a short time, the board had brainstormed some great ideas for the HOA and my wife and I had a few of our own for our multiple businesses. I felt ready to come up with more great ideas and couldn't wait to get started. It had been quite some time since I'd sat and done nothing but think.

I do my best thinking alone. Usually outside, in a natural setting. I try to do so in the car when I'm driving to work by listening to various thought provoking audio books, but invariably my attention is drawn to a car braking in front of me, or a turn I need to make to arrive at my destination.

No matter what I came up with though, there was ultimately a catch I couldn't avoid.

Although myself or anyone else could think of great ideas, *I* was the only one around who could, or would, do the implementation of those ideas. Don't get me wrong. I'm not complaining. Just bringing to light my discovery last week that when you think it might take X amount of time, it will probably take Y, where Y equals at least X squared. And that, quite frankly, is how my wide open week somehow melted away to nothing.

Suddenly, I went from having 96 virtually unstructured hours to create amazing strategic initiatives for our businesses and the HOA, to instead finding myself tangled up in the awful monotony of updating three separate web sites: Mine, my wife's, and my HOA's, as well as providing a web design company detailed information and photos to get our e-commerce clothing site up and running by July 1st.

I learned how to juggle at 12 and just never considered that it might be wise to stop eventually. I recommend this book, for which I'd graciously like to thank my uncle for buying me 19 years ago. Yes, as you can clearly see, this is obviously all his fault. =P

So that, my friends, is exactly how I ended up finding myself staring into the bottom of my pool on a Saturday evening enjoying a Modelo Especial (yes, good Mexican beer can be found in Georgia), reflecting on the apparent colossal waste of time I had squandered that week and thinking about pulling a Cameron Frye right then and there.

Instead, I had a Eureka moment and realized my time spent stuck on/in the web that week wasn't all that futile. I had discovered something invaluable that should have been obvious to me long ago: *I* didn't need to be the one doing this kind of work! That's when I realized what all successful corporations picked up on a long time ago -- I need help!

And to do that I have to hire someone else to do this so I can do other things I'm more qualified and adept at doing. Not necessarily more important things, but other, more strategic things. Call it an insight into outsourcing. I quantify this as my first deviation from a fledgling one man business to a semi mature business of multiple people. I'm no IBM yet, but I'm trying to start to thinking like one.

Proof of such insight comes from Parker and I officially moving out of the sole proprietor world and into the wild and crazy lair of LLC's by hiring our first assistant this last week. To quote Robert Frost, "And that has made all the difference!" (I won't even go into how many people we went through before we found her.)

So look for me to be blogging a bit more often in the future since we have now added a competent and qualified individual to our team. I will also make certain that I delegate work to her, not just abdicate my responsibilities and go off on a wild three week bender in the Caribbean.

If we're really lucky though, she might just stick around long enough to become a valuable partner in our many businesses before she "wises up" and seeks the benefits of striking out on her own.

Just like I did a few years ago...

I know I don't. This was my monthly newsletter to my HOA for May.

_________________________________________________

Sunday, May 16th, 2006
11:35pm

Irwin Place Residents –

It has often been said that that there are many a road paved with good intentions, all leading to a particular location most of us do not desire to ever visit. I wouldn't go so far as to say that is how I feel about what I must do this week, but I hope you can see the correlation by the time I’m done.

As president of the Irwin Place Homeowners Association, it is my duty to inform those residents who are in violation of the protective covenants that they have gone astray, regardless of their membership status in the association. This is not my favorite type of activity. In fact, I abhor it. I find advising of violations to be completely anathema to building a sense of community when homeowners are only hearing from the association when they have been accused of doing something wrong by it. I prefer instead to build relationships with people when they are not doing anything wrong, rather than accosting them when others say they are not following the rules, pressing me into the uncomfortable role of enforcer.

Regardless of my personal feelings, I will perform my duties as recently requested by homeowners in the area. For the record, in the next week I will be mailing out a total of eleven letters of violation of the protective covenants of Irwin Place. In a neighborhood of 190+ homes, that’s a fairly low percentage – 5.7% - or roughly 1 in 17 homes. The complaints deal most often with the issue of utility trailers parked where they are visible from the street or unsightly yards. Many residents of Irwin Place have their lawns done by commercial lawn care companies and I thank them for doing so. I and many others have no problem with this, as the vehicles, trailers and workers are rarely there for more than an hour or two as the job is being completed. What we're trying to do through this particular notification is stop a minor problem in its tracks, before it becomes a major image issue in our wonderful neighborhood.

Quality-of-life is something all of us seek out naturally. You don’t have to be encouraged to live in a pleasant neighborhood – most people desire to automatically. In fact, I don’t know a single person who aspires to live in a ghetto; those who do live there out of necessity, not choice. For some owners, this intangible quality represents much of the reason they have remained in Irwin Place for 20 years or longer. For me, it has a considerable amount to do with the reason my wife and I moved here, and why we intend to stay for 20 years or more. If the new and current residents are to preserve Irwin Place as the upstanding community it has always been, we must all attempt to enforce the rules when they are violated, rather than look away and hope for the best.

Although I was at one time a criminal justice major, I never became a police officer. Part of the reason for that is that I struggled with the inelasticity of laws and rules, as they are written for the majority of occasions, but do not cover the circumstances of all occasions. There always seemed to me to be times and aspects of people’s actions that fell just outside the strict interpretation of the rule of law, yet still left them in violation. Strict enforcement of rules without consideration of individual circumstances and rationales is, frankly, illogical. I don't know about you, but I don't live in a black-and-white world. My world is composed instead of multiple shades of gray with lots of shadows thrown in.

I’d like to start with the issue of the covenants themselves. While there is only one set of bylaws, there are indeed eight separate covenants governing Irwin Place, based upon which particular phase your home was built, one through eight. However, having looked over a majority of them, I discovered few, if any, discrepancies between them. So let’s move forward and take up the issues of neighbors with chain link fences and unpainted driveways, two covenants of which I have heard complaints about in my short two month tenure. To me, neither of these complaints is logical.

Perhaps when the subdivision was brand new, a charcoal painted driveway was desirable and visually appealing, giving a sophisticated look to each home. However, I am certain that over the first summer of walking over a black top driveway the builders and homeowners realized the error in requiring it by statute. The enforcement of this covenant is wrong in many ways. First of all, a concrete driveway painted charcoal is not environmentally friendly. All paints, and especially outdoor paints containing epoxy, release harmful VOC’s (Volatile Organic Chemicals) that are detrimental to humans, animals, and the environment. It also forces you to spend more money to cool your home every summer as the heat surrounding your home dissipates much later in the day having absorbed massive amounts of heat into the driveway, rather than reflected it as an unpainted one would. Plus, painting a driveway in an area that receives as much inclement weather as we do is an invitation to constant maintenance costs – and concrete paint is far from cheap. If you maintain a clean and respectable driveway, painting it every year is ultimately an unnecessary step.

Moving on to the fence complaint I am baffled by the idea that a chain link fence is a visual “eyesore”, and more so by the proposal that painting the fence black solves the issue. The fence is still there, it’s still made of chain link, but now it has to be painted regularly. Certainly, if given the option, you would prefer your neighbor put in a beautiful stained wooden fence, but presumably the fence is being put in for a reason, and that reason is not to annoy their neighbor. Would you rather your neighbor’s dog run loose or his pool remain open for a child to wander into and drown?

Addressing both of these issues falls to covenants 4, 15 and 17 respectively. Covenant 4 says you must paint your driveway charcoal black, however covenant 15 states that we can choose to enforce or not enforce a covenant, and just because we don’t, doesn’t mean we can’t in the future. Covenant 17 says only that “fences must be approved”. It says nothing of requirements of type, height, or composition. Unless the fence was some unnatural color, such as neon pink, which would fall under requirements of conformity with the community, I see no need to address that issue as an association. I feel that fighting over these types of “violations” of the covenants does nothing more than start needless feuds between neighbors who could have just as easily been friends if they’d not lived right next to each other.

However, I do believe in the broken windows theory. For those of you who are not familiar with this theory, in a nutshell the broken windows theory is a law enforcement adage that represents larger crimes follow when smaller crimes are allowed to proliferate in any area. The belief is that when people who bend the law note that minor offenses are not being enforced or reacted to, they will push the boundaries of law and order further and further out to the fringe, going on to perform greater and greater misdeeds in the process and inviting others to do the same. This doesn't mean I think we have criminals living in Irwin Place, but I do believe that if we let the little things go, such as our lawns, visible utility trailers, cars parked on the street, and unsightly yards, we are definitely inviting greater problems down the line.

Guests in our subdivision, both potential homeowners, day to day contractors, as well as real estate agents, will take note of these negative images as they travel through our subdivision. Meanwhile, we as residents will quickly grow immune and complacent, having been exposed to these seemingly minor offenses every day until they simply strike us as normal. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist or a real estate agent to tell you what kind of effect that will have on property values in Irwin Place in just a short time.

I don’t want to appear to be petty, nor do I want hide behind a shield of, “I’m just doing my job,” when I send out these letters. I want you all to understand that I believe in what I'm doing and doing it for good reason, not just to pick on you because I have nothing better to do. I know you have many other better things to do than reply to a letter from your homeowners association, as trust me, I have many other things I’d rather do than write, deliver, and follow up on the offenders in the neighborhood.

The whole point of my letter this month is simply to let you know where we stand and that people out there are watching out for our community’s best interests, even if you don’t feel that way if you find yourself on the receiving end of a violation letter. We're not a bunch of children calling each other out; hoping to be the first to complain about something someone is doing wrong. We’re just all concerned homeowners who have a joint interest in our community remaining top-notch and desirable, all aspects which lead to stable and increasing home values.

If you receive an enforcement letter, please don't ignore it. I would prefer to take care of this on a personal level and am asking you, as a personal favor as both a homeowner and the association president, to please get on board and correct the violation. What were asking you to do is minor, fairly straightforward and requires little effort on your part to comply with the covenants. We’re not asking for a kidney.

However, if you choose to ignore our requests, and homeowners continue to approach me about repeated violations, our hand will be forced. Having given you the option to comply willingly, we will have to move down the line of available options of enforcement, including financial penalties (Covenant 13) and possible legal action if necessary.

Is this really what I want to do? Is it how I want the association perceived? I answer to both questions with a resounding no.

Yet I've been elected to the office of president, a symbolic position representative of the collective voice of the community. These are not my words. They are a request from your fellow homeowners. The people you share the neighborhood and roads with, people whose families you may know, all with the same goal in mind: a beautiful, safe, crime free neighborhood community that is enjoyable to live in and experiencing an increase in value, not ire.

Am I suggesting that piles of leaves or bark, overgrown lawns, visible utility trailers, cars parked on the road, and unpainted fences or driveways is going to lead to a rash of drive-by shootings or rampant burglaries in our neighborhood? Of course not, but why take that first step down the slippery slope and let our community suffer for our complacency?

Thank you all for taking the time to understand why we practice protective covenant enforcement. For those of you who are interested, the Bylaws and Covenants are posted online for your perusal at anytime, or you can request a copy be mailed to you and I will be happy to comply.

I look forward to meeting you all at the Irwin Place Spring barbecue at the pool and tennis courts on Saturday, June 3rd between 4 p.m. and 8 p.m.

Look for me in an apron, cooking away at the grill…



Your Irwin Place Homeowner’s President,

Craig M. Beck