Rick Kearney is applying a radical solution to employee turnover: He's building an "employee-centric" office park to house his business, Mainline Information Systems, as well as other fast-growing companies. But will it fly?
Rick Kearney set out to squash his company's turnover by building the ultimate employee-centric workplace. Now, two years and close to $12 million later, he's expecting more from Summit East -- much more
Only Rick Kearney knows why he did it. And for the moment, anyway, that's just fine with him. "Very few people have the total vision," says the computer entrepreneur. "They just don't absorb it." Until they do -- and he's sure "they will, eventually" -- those around Kearney are free to draw whatever conclusions they want about what he's been up to since May 1998, when he first decided that he needed to take full ownership of a 116-acre former cow pasture. It was then that he pledged himself to building an "employee-centric office park" on the site. After plunking down $4.6 million to acquire the dirt, Kearney has since spent an additional $2.9 million on the development, in addition to $4.2 million to put up his own headquarters there. "Some people think I'm crazy, but I'm not doing this imprudently," he insists, though he freely admits he knew "nothing" about real-estate development when he started.
Building the office park is a mystifying move, but it's one that's in keeping -- aside from its scale -- with the character of the 42-year-old, whose soft voice and sporty polo shirt guarantee that he'll be underestimated. "It scares the heck out of her," he exclaims, describing the reaction of his wife, Bernadette, to his latest undertaking. "Did he ask me? No," she reports. "But I trust whatever he says he wants to do."
What Kearney wants to do isn't always easy to predict. Back in 1986, for instance, he quit his gig as a systems engineer at IBM Corp. -- on the same day, no less, that he'd earned admittance into a prestigious recognition program -- to devote himself to, um, volunteer work. "I think I said something like, "Thank goodness, I'm sitting down,' " recalls Bob Ramay, who was then Kearney's boss. "But I knew Rick, so I knew he had thought this through."
"Rick has accomplished many things I told him couldn't be done," says Mainline's CFO, Erin Ennis.
What Ramay didn't suspect was that years later he'd find himself working as a project manager at Mainline Information Systems Inc., the computer reseller Kearney started in 1989, after having started a nonprofit and cofounded a foster home. Kearney has devoted the past decade to furiously building the fast-growing Mainline, a four-time Inc. 500 company based in Tallahassee, Fla., into a regional and then national competitor -- and then an international one with projected revenues of $135 million this year. As CEO, president, and sole owner of the company, Kearney carefully credits "understanding IBM" as "the key to our success," leaving out his own bullheaded opportunism. In 1996, when sales were at $19 million, Kearney committed Mainline -- even the name is calculated, he says, to convey that "we are mainstream people, not computer weirdos" -- to becoming one of the first IBM business partners to peddle its precious mainframes (now known, to ease the stigma, as enterprise servers). By 1997 sales had skyrocketed to $70 million. To get there Kearney had doubled the number of employees by hiring a dozen salespeople and four vice-presidents.
"Rick considers himself to be a visionary," says Erin Ennis, Mainline's chief financial officer. "He isn't satisfied with anything less than a big mission." And he isn't easily deterred. Last year, she recalls, "we all told him he was crazy" for wanting to start a separate venture to showcase the company's emerging expertise in E-commerce. The result: Kearney launched Shirttailor.com in November. "Rick has accomplished many things I told him couldn't be done," Ennis says.
Even so, as the former CEO of a real estate conglomerate, Ennis felt duty-bound to "talk frankly" with Kearney about his imposing scheme to single-handedly develop the land that a $75,000 granite sign now identifies as Summit East. She reminded him about the fickle fortunes of the community's real estate developers, warned him of the project's potential for sapping him of his time and Mainline of its much-needed internal capital. Across town, she pointed out, Arvida -- the development arm of the St. Joe Co., the state's largest real estate company -- was building a 5,000-home community called Southwood, which would eventually include 5.7 million square feet of commercial space. Kearney heard what Ennis had to say -- or claims he did. "I tend to resist, but I do listen," he says. "She's tried to add a certain amount of sanity to it."
But there was little room left for sanity -- or anything else -- in Kearney's grandly detailed design for the park. He envisioned as many as 20 office buildings, each one housing employees of fast-growing technology companies, including his own. The Summit East companies would, in effect, share the costs (and, of course, the benefits) of state-of-the-art systems, from a videoconferencing center that would broadcast live classes, to a centralized "brain" for backing up data. They'd also find themselves equipped with the most modern tools for retaining talent, able to offer an atmosphere where their employees could commune among the majestic oaks or linger by a picturesque pond, while never being far from their beloved laptops, thanks to strategically placed wireless transmitters. Kearney wanted Mainline workers to toil in cubicles they would help design; he wanted them to be able to click on icons to alert the park's concierge to such pressing errands as dry-cleaning pickups or take-out lunch deliveries. Using the park's intranet, employees at Summit East would be able to tap in and check on the kids they'd dropped off at its day-care center. There would be jugglers at lunchtime and jazz concerts at dusk, and in-between, employees would strike up the bandwidth using fiber-optic pipelines and feel the rush of hyperactive phone switches. After work they could dine at the park's restaurants, shop at its grocery store and strip center (now known, to ease the stigma, as a midsize shopping center), and pick up prescriptions at its pharmacy. With so much so close, employees wouldn't ever need, or want, to leave.
