Which was, as Kearney kept insisting, the reason he was building Summit East: to end, once and for all, Mainline's chronic retention and recruitment problems. Well, that's how he sold the idea anyway. "What Rick wanted to do was to create an environment for people so that they'd want to come to work there, even if they were not getting the same size paycheck that they could be getting in California," says general contractor Laurie Dozier, the cofounder and president of Mad Dog Design & Construction Co., a local contractor with about $20 million in revenues. Dozier, recounting his initial discussions with Kearney in the summer of 1998, says, "He wanted this to be the workplace of the future."
That's true but hardly complete. Kearney, whose employees will move into Summit East's first building this month, hasn't shelled out roughly $12 million solely to buy the undying loyalty of his 70 local workers. As he -- and, for now, he alone -- sees it, the "smart campus" represents his most intelligent weapon against an enemy that threatens Mainline's viability, an insidious foe that other company builders may not behold until it's too late. "Right now, this is 'Rick Kearney's wild idea.' But once people see it, they'll grasp what it's about," confides the CEO, whose company posts net profit margins of around 10%. "This is absolutely critical to the survival of this company."
Planting himself in what will one day be the giant atrium of his new building's foyer, Rick Kearney draws such a vivid picture that he seems not to notice everything that's missing: the circular reception desk, the zigzagging staircase, the glass-enclosed sky bridge and -- perhaps most conspicuously of all -- his own feet. Most of the absences can be explained by the fact that Mainline's building, on this day in late December, is still about five months from completion. Kearney's dress shoes, on the other hand, were fully operational, and visible, until very recently. By the time he attempts to reclaim them, they have sunk almost up to their laces in the ooze of mud that Summit East, softened by two days of drenching downpours, has become.
But Kearney, ever determined to finish what he's started, insists on completing his lavish description of the "kinetic artwork" that he imagines sprouting from the opposite wall. He's conjuring a 12-foot metal tree, its branches protruding in all directions, with 18 video monitors hanging from them. If such a totem exists, he hasn't yet found it. Neither has Dozier, who hoped he'd gotten close last autumn when he snapped a picture of a video wall he spotted while vacationing in Belgium. But "it wasn't what Rick was after," reports Dozier. And Kearney, as the contractor has learned by now, always knows exactly what he's after.
Through Summit East, he's out to lend new meaning to the term Internet bubble by creating a self-contained colony for young, brainy E-centrics. Upon moving in, CEOs will simply plug their companies into the park's state-of-the-art voice, data, and communications network, and thus be spared even the momentary distraction of having to choose their own systems. Kearney foresees the enrolled companies' helping one another by forming alliances, identifying opportunities, and occasionally sharing their Java programmers.
So rigid are Kearney's ideas about Summit East that he's convinced he can get the park he wants only by doing it himself. Not that he hasn't sought any formal input. In early 1998, he paid $22,000 to have an Orlando-based real-estate-consulting company analyze key elements of his plan: Should Summit East be gated? How wide need the roads be? Motel or hotel? Sit-down restaurant or fast-food joint? Waterfalls? Ponds? According to Owen Beitsch, executive vice-president of Real Estate Research Consultants Inc., Kearney "or at least one of his staff people" showed him the door after reading his company's recommendations. "His principal objective is about keeping the human resources involved. We explained that while we agreed with his objectives for preserving human capital, real estate is at best a speculative business," says Beitsch, who criticized Summit East as being too big, too costly, and at an unproven location to boot. "We suggested some ways to reduce the speculative nature of the opportunity, such as finding a developer. He chose to disagree that it was speculative, and he chose to do it himself," says Beitsch. Kearney proudly confirms that "I totally ignored everything he said," which he succinctly summarizes thusly: "Their final analysis was, 'You're in over your head, and you should sell the whole thing.' "
After digesting Beitsch's biting report, Kearney upped his real estate holdings by buying out his partner. Needless to say, "my preference would have been to continue to own half of it," Ennis notes. William F. Butler, a partner at Boutin Brown Butler, a local real-estate-appraisal and -consulting firm, who evaluated the property last year, valiantly validates Kearney's scheme even as he tenderly tempers it. "The park is not going to grow weeds," he says. "But will it become the high-tech mecca that Rick wants it to be? That's the question," says Butler, who has served as an adviser on the project.
Now, with the completion of Mainline's headquarters, what Summit East has indisputably become is a tribute to Kearney's rock-hard commitment, which rivals the thick steel frames bordering the hillside building's windows. He's serious about what he says. When he promises to give a visitor uninterrupted time, Kearney doesn't just mean that he'll ignore any calls. He actually unplugs the phone and wraps the limp cord around its receiver for emphasis.
Dozier got his first whiff of Kearney's pungent passion when he beheld the budget for Mainline's 30,800-square-foot building. At $4.2 million, Kearney's spending level was "rare for this community," says Dozier. At roughly $136 a square foot, the building has cost about one and a half times the price tag of the average office building in the area, Kearney estimates.
Kearney calls his "campus" the "offices of the next millennium."
But the budget's size was only the first signal that Kearney, who sees himself as building "the offices of the next millennium," would disregard any and all preexisting practices. In choosing an architect, for instance, he settled on Manausa Lewis & Dodson Architects Inc., a local firm that had never designed a corporate office building. "I told Rick that I was going to design him an award winner," explains principal C. Trent Manausa. In selecting an interior designer, Kearney bypassed local contenders and chose Griswold, Heckel & Kelly Associates Inc. (GHK), a Chicago-based firm that, he had read, designed surroundings for the kind of company he wanted Mainline to become -- namely, a giant company like Sun Microsystems or Hewlett-Packard. "I wanted to be able to get the coolest and best of what's out there," he says.
