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2025 Home Show Greeting
April 7, 2025 |
Hi!
Kris Freeberg here, Economist at Making End$ Meet.
Thanks for saying hi at the home show! I enjoyed meeting you, and am writing to get a little better acquainted, in hopes that we might do some business together.
Kris Freeberg here, Economist at Making End$ Meet.
Thanks for saying hi at the home show! I enjoyed meeting you, and am writing to get a little better acquainted, in hopes that we might do some business together.
Stately Freeberg Manor (SFM) back in the day, circa 1914
Who will hire whom first? As I may have mentioned, I own a 111 year old legacy home (above) that my family has inhabited for 81 years, since 1944.
Imagine buying a home the same year the allies invaded Normandy! Intense! I can't imagine it, but that's what my grandparents did!
My dad passed away in late 2023 at the age of 92. As I may have also mentioned, he was always a DIY kind of guy (I have a basement workshop containing three generations of tools!) and as he got into his late 60s or early 70s he began to slow down, but always thought of himself as DIY until the very end.
Know the type?
As time passed he would say to himself, "There is a project. I could do it. But right now, I could use a nap. Maybe I'll get around to it tomorrow." And so it went for some 25 years. Hence, I have a lot of deferred maintenance to attend to, and I may very well call on you for help with it.
Last year I rebuilt a garage, replaced the roof, built a new deck (fabulous view from the top of Sehome Hill in Bellingham), and abated a lot of overgrown plants. This year I'm focused on reclaiming an adjacent empty view lot, windows, and paint. I also have electrical and plumbing projects in the foreseeable future. So, lots to do!
Imagine buying a home the same year the allies invaded Normandy! Intense! I can't imagine it, but that's what my grandparents did!
My dad passed away in late 2023 at the age of 92. As I may have also mentioned, he was always a DIY kind of guy (I have a basement workshop containing three generations of tools!) and as he got into his late 60s or early 70s he began to slow down, but always thought of himself as DIY until the very end.
Know the type?
As time passed he would say to himself, "There is a project. I could do it. But right now, I could use a nap. Maybe I'll get around to it tomorrow." And so it went for some 25 years. Hence, I have a lot of deferred maintenance to attend to, and I may very well call on you for help with it.
Last year I rebuilt a garage, replaced the roof, built a new deck (fabulous view from the top of Sehome Hill in Bellingham), and abated a lot of overgrown plants. This year I'm focused on reclaiming an adjacent empty view lot, windows, and paint. I also have electrical and plumbing projects in the foreseeable future. So, lots to do!
Making End$ Meet is a local private microeconomics practice. Since 1996, I've been helping people make their ends meet. (Overlap, actually. Heh. It's an understatement. I've helped some become multi millionaires.)
It starts with a Lifetime Savings Plan, in which we figure out assets and income needed to afford long term life goals. From there we get involved in budgets, accounting, investment research, and business management.
Since 2015 I've been focused on real estate, property management (I'm a fractional CFO for a few property management companies), and home services businesses, and have become fascinated by latest trends and developments in Field Services CRMs, especially the ones that integrate with accounting (presumably QuickBooks Online, in most cases).
At the home show (and elsewhere) I learned that Service Titan is an especially popular one, and in the next 60-90 days I'm going to create a thorough apples-to-apples comparison chart of Field Services CRMs, kind of like this one that I did in 2017 for more general purpose CRMs. I'm excited to take a deep dive into Service Titan and add it to my own tool kit.
I'm an Accountant by training, but around graduation time (1992) I decided that what accountants usually do is boring, so I took a left turn into Economics, which has been much more fun and interesting. While Accounting is the language of Economics, Economics itself delves into motivation, forecasting, strategy, valuation and pricing, marketing and sales, etc. It's much more future focused. I really enjoy it.
It starts with a Lifetime Savings Plan, in which we figure out assets and income needed to afford long term life goals. From there we get involved in budgets, accounting, investment research, and business management.
Since 2015 I've been focused on real estate, property management (I'm a fractional CFO for a few property management companies), and home services businesses, and have become fascinated by latest trends and developments in Field Services CRMs, especially the ones that integrate with accounting (presumably QuickBooks Online, in most cases).
At the home show (and elsewhere) I learned that Service Titan is an especially popular one, and in the next 60-90 days I'm going to create a thorough apples-to-apples comparison chart of Field Services CRMs, kind of like this one that I did in 2017 for more general purpose CRMs. I'm excited to take a deep dive into Service Titan and add it to my own tool kit.
I'm an Accountant by training, but around graduation time (1992) I decided that what accountants usually do is boring, so I took a left turn into Economics, which has been much more fun and interesting. While Accounting is the language of Economics, Economics itself delves into motivation, forecasting, strategy, valuation and pricing, marketing and sales, etc. It's much more future focused. I really enjoy it.
QuickBase. Ten years ago a client in your industry asked me for help knowing how he did. He said, "My bookkeeper hands me a P&L and I can't relate to it. I can't remember what I did last month and it's water under the bridge anyway. I need a scoreboard showing how I'm doing while the game is still in play."
Long story short, I built a kind of Work In Progress (WIP) solution for him starting with a spreadsheet prototype. Later I migrated the prototype onto the QuickBase platform, where I'm a certified developer - maybe you've heard of it - and the app grew into much more than a WIP program. Now sales pass from his CRM, through his accounting, and into QuickBase where we're able to build reports and charts that the other apps can't do, track employee competency, run pay-for-performance (P4P) initiatives, and so much more.
QuickBase just held their annual conference in New Orleans. From the keynotes I learned that while off-the-shelf solutions like Service Titan are great at what they do, they seem to fill 80% of a company's needs. The remaining 20% is what they call "Grey Work", also called "Spreadsheet Hell." That's where QuickBase really seems to shine, in handling that remaining 20%. It's used by notable companies like T Mobile and Amazon; they call it their "connective tissue."
Long story short, I built a kind of Work In Progress (WIP) solution for him starting with a spreadsheet prototype. Later I migrated the prototype onto the QuickBase platform, where I'm a certified developer - maybe you've heard of it - and the app grew into much more than a WIP program. Now sales pass from his CRM, through his accounting, and into QuickBase where we're able to build reports and charts that the other apps can't do, track employee competency, run pay-for-performance (P4P) initiatives, and so much more.
QuickBase just held their annual conference in New Orleans. From the keynotes I learned that while off-the-shelf solutions like Service Titan are great at what they do, they seem to fill 80% of a company's needs. The remaining 20% is what they call "Grey Work", also called "Spreadsheet Hell." That's where QuickBase really seems to shine, in handling that remaining 20%. It's used by notable companies like T Mobile and Amazon; they call it their "connective tissue."
Time Keeping. Everyone agrees that time is our most valuable non-renewable resource. In one way or another, we're all in the process of converting time into money.
Am I right?
Using myself as a guinea pig, I've been tracking my time in QuickBase as though it were money for ten years - not just work time, but all waking hours. That's 16 x 365 = 5,840 annual waking hours. Let me tell you, it has really been enlightening!
Some may think that's OCD, but I say it's just professional. And as a hard charging entrepreneur yourself, you know how in this economy nobody works M - F, 9 - 5 any more. Business is a 24 / 7 / 365 endeavor! That's why it makes sense to track the whole day.
I mean, hey: you may decide to goof off during the day and work at night. Or hit the slopes mid week when the lines or short and work on the weekend.
Am I right? That's why it makes sense to track all time.
The below graph shows my actual time since 2015 when I started tracking. As you can see I worked "overtime" (more than 2,000 hours) in 2016 and 2019. In 2020 I was hit with colon cancer (DURING COVID!) and had to spend 2020-2022 recovering from it. Elder care overlapped with my cancer recovery in 2022-2023, and in 2023-2024 I spent a lot of time fixing up the house. Now in 2025 as I continue to work on the house, I'm also more focused on BizDev.
But my point is, look at the green. IT'S HUGE!
Am I right?
Using myself as a guinea pig, I've been tracking my time in QuickBase as though it were money for ten years - not just work time, but all waking hours. That's 16 x 365 = 5,840 annual waking hours. Let me tell you, it has really been enlightening!
Some may think that's OCD, but I say it's just professional. And as a hard charging entrepreneur yourself, you know how in this economy nobody works M - F, 9 - 5 any more. Business is a 24 / 7 / 365 endeavor! That's why it makes sense to track the whole day.
I mean, hey: you may decide to goof off during the day and work at night. Or hit the slopes mid week when the lines or short and work on the weekend.
Am I right? That's why it makes sense to track all time.
The below graph shows my actual time since 2015 when I started tracking. As you can see I worked "overtime" (more than 2,000 hours) in 2016 and 2019. In 2020 I was hit with colon cancer (DURING COVID!) and had to spend 2020-2022 recovering from it. Elder care overlapped with my cancer recovery in 2022-2023, and in 2023-2024 I spent a lot of time fixing up the house. Now in 2025 as I continue to work on the house, I'm also more focused on BizDev.
But my point is, look at the green. IT'S HUGE!
Do you know what else it is?
MONEY IN THE BANK.
Say you need more income. What do you do?
You adjust how you spend your time.
And I don't mean just working at an hourly rate for more hours. Maybe spend time on R&D instead of Instagram, Facebook, Youtube, or doom scrolling the news for the umpteenth time. Learn something new that will make you more valuable in the marketplace.
So all that green area . . . it's like a huge financial reserve. And if you understand how it's spent, you can make strategic decisions about what to do with it in the future.
That's what I'm doing, and it's fun! It's like a game. You can "gamify" it.
With ten years of data in hand, I'm now able every morning as a part of my morning coffee ritual to look back and see what I did on today's date 1-9 years ago. I always learn something, either a mistake to avoid, or a win to leverage. Either way, it's all good!
MONEY IN THE BANK.
Say you need more income. What do you do?
You adjust how you spend your time.
And I don't mean just working at an hourly rate for more hours. Maybe spend time on R&D instead of Instagram, Facebook, Youtube, or doom scrolling the news for the umpteenth time. Learn something new that will make you more valuable in the marketplace.
So all that green area . . . it's like a huge financial reserve. And if you understand how it's spent, you can make strategic decisions about what to do with it in the future.
That's what I'm doing, and it's fun! It's like a game. You can "gamify" it.
With ten years of data in hand, I'm now able every morning as a part of my morning coffee ritual to look back and see what I did on today's date 1-9 years ago. I always learn something, either a mistake to avoid, or a win to leverage. Either way, it's all good!
Well, you're probably thinking, that's all very interesting, but what difference does it make?
In my case, it helped me triple my income, while I was coping with cancer. It helped me identify the most vital people and activities. It helped me put first things first. It helped me understand my constraints in terms of both time and energy, especially when I was going through radiation and chemotherapy.
It also made me mindful. It arrested time wasters, rumination, and depression.
Look: as an Economist, I'm all about understanding resources, constraints, bottle necks, and opportunity costs; and time is everyone's most fundamental resource. That's why I take it so seriously as to seem OCD. But I hope you can see how by eliminating depression and tripling my income, it has definitely been a beneficial move.
And those benefits just scratch the surface. As an aging person, it seems like every week I increasingly appreciate the search and filtering aspects that aid my recall.
In my case, it helped me triple my income, while I was coping with cancer. It helped me identify the most vital people and activities. It helped me put first things first. It helped me understand my constraints in terms of both time and energy, especially when I was going through radiation and chemotherapy.
It also made me mindful. It arrested time wasters, rumination, and depression.
Look: as an Economist, I'm all about understanding resources, constraints, bottle necks, and opportunity costs; and time is everyone's most fundamental resource. That's why I take it so seriously as to seem OCD. But I hope you can see how by eliminating depression and tripling my income, it has definitely been a beneficial move.
And those benefits just scratch the surface. As an aging person, it seems like every week I increasingly appreciate the search and filtering aspects that aid my recall.
Memory / Aging / Memory Loss / Dementia. Before I close this message, allow me to share a little story about my dad. He was a Ph.D. Psychologist, a man of the mind.
As he aged, his own mind began to go; and let me tell you, for someone who has made the mind his profession, that is especially troubling.
One evening we were watching TV together, that program "60 Minutes" which, in the summer, did reruns. It must have been summer time because they played a rerun, which I recognized, so I said to him, "We've seen this one before."
"No we haven't", he said.
"Sure", I said. "Look: I'll tell you the next thing that is going to happen in this segment," and I did; and I was right.
He gave me a very stern look and said,
As he aged, his own mind began to go; and let me tell you, for someone who has made the mind his profession, that is especially troubling.
One evening we were watching TV together, that program "60 Minutes" which, in the summer, did reruns. It must have been summer time because they played a rerun, which I recognized, so I said to him, "We've seen this one before."
"No we haven't", he said.
"Sure", I said. "Look: I'll tell you the next thing that is going to happen in this segment," and I did; and I was right.
He gave me a very stern look and said,
"This is an argument you don't want to win."
Why did he say that?
Because he knew that if he lost his memory, my life would become more difficult. He would become a burden to me.
Well, I was his caregiver, and I did spend more time with him during the final years of his life (which is one reason why my work hours during that time were less than 2,000), but he wasn't a burden and it was time well spent. I was happy to do it; and in his final months, we danced together as I would help him move from place to place, standing up and sitting down. I would embrace him in a bear hug and we would rock together, shifting from foot to foot because he was so frail and weak.
I wouldn't trade that time for all the money in the world. It was a privilege and an honor, the least I could do for the one who gave me life, and an excellent childhood.
All this to say . . . late life memory challenges are rough, and they seem to be getting worse, probably because we live in such a scatterbrained culture, where our attention spans are sliced to ribbons by constant change and social media feeds. It's a prescription for amnesia.
That is why I appreciate my time keeping now more than ever. It has become a searchable, filterable, sortable, personal, private memory bank that I now find myself querying on a weekly basis for all kinds of things that Google or Chat GPT can't answer.
Because he knew that if he lost his memory, my life would become more difficult. He would become a burden to me.
Well, I was his caregiver, and I did spend more time with him during the final years of his life (which is one reason why my work hours during that time were less than 2,000), but he wasn't a burden and it was time well spent. I was happy to do it; and in his final months, we danced together as I would help him move from place to place, standing up and sitting down. I would embrace him in a bear hug and we would rock together, shifting from foot to foot because he was so frail and weak.
I wouldn't trade that time for all the money in the world. It was a privilege and an honor, the least I could do for the one who gave me life, and an excellent childhood.
All this to say . . . late life memory challenges are rough, and they seem to be getting worse, probably because we live in such a scatterbrained culture, where our attention spans are sliced to ribbons by constant change and social media feeds. It's a prescription for amnesia.
That is why I appreciate my time keeping now more than ever. It has become a searchable, filterable, sortable, personal, private memory bank that I now find myself querying on a weekly basis for all kinds of things that Google or Chat GPT can't answer.
Well thanks for taking the time to read through all of this. If any of the above resonates with you in any way, I hope you'll reach out, (360) 224-4322 or [email protected].
Have a great 2025, and beyond!
Kris Freeberg, Economist
Kris Freeberg, Economist
