But other people -- -in this case subordinates -- are supposed to have been Kearney's entire reason for undertaking Summit East. In recent years Kearney, whose company now employs 135 workers in total, hasn't been able to budge Mainline's 20% turnover rate. Until last year, that is -- when it shot up above 25%, a spike he attributes to the ill effects of having employees spread out in different buildings. Feeling "isolated and abandoned," he explains, has made some of them vulnerable to the frequent feelers they get from headhunters.
Summit East isn't Kearney's first attempt at curbing turnover. Hoping to inspire loyalty, he's already boosted employee benefits. He's outfitted employees with cell phones and pagers, and even offered them the option of telecommuting. "They all just become entitlements," he says -- including the three-night cruises for two, offered to employees in 1997 (in the Bahamas) and 1998 (in the Bahamas and around Key West). In 1997 he went so far as to launch Integra Professional Services, a subsidiary dedicated to recruiting technical personnel for both the company and its customers. The money-draining experiment lasted 18 months. Similarly, a short-lived plan to offer senior executives phantom stock -- in lieu of stock options, which Kearney claims he'll be ready to grant "in the not-so-distant future" -- ended up spooking him.
"I became disheartened," says Kearney, who realized that "if you do all those things, you have only a chance." Hoping to lift those odds, and inspired by the camaraderie and job satisfaction he noticed at the more "people-centric" vendors and IBM outposts he had visited, four years ago he began looking for four acres that Mainline could call its own. There, he'd create "an environment that spoke of success and quality and future growth and opportunity." But as his desire to find just the right spot deepened -- not one next to a truck stop or abutting a housing project -- 4 acres became 10 acres. Then 12. He was considering paying $800,000 for 20 acres when, in November 1997, a deal came along for some land on the east side of Tallahassee, at the interchange of U.S. 90 East and Interstate 10. He spent $2.1 million to buy a 50% partnership interest in what is now Summit East.
Kearney's vision: the ultimate employee-centric workplace.
As the plot thickened, and lengthened, so did his ambitions. He began talking about making it impossible for employees to be recruited away "once they'd tasted the goodness of what our campus has to offer." Last September, having obtained the necessary permits, gotten the city's OK on spending $2.2 million to extend its sewer system, and even won over the park's neighbors, Kearney couldn't contain his satisfaction over the plans for Mainline's building. At the time, he described the new headquarters to me this way, "All of this is designed with this idea in mind: if you were an employee designing a workplace, what would you like to see? -- as opposed to what's cheapest for the employer."
That makes it sound as if employees have been canvassed and questioned, probed about which environmental elements they'd like to see incorporated. Not exactly. Seven employees did make up the committee that met with five vendors of cubicles, evaluating their offerings in terms of structure and value. And all employees were invited to test the systems, then fill out questionnaires. "I know more about workstations than I care to know," says Sherrie Kishbaugh, marketing-operations manager, who later sat on the committee that tested 10 different chairs. The winner, she notes, was also one of the most expensive candidates. In terms of other input, employee Mike Jones says in November he visited Summit East, where Kearney sought his opinion on the best color for the wall fencing in the smoking area. "I didn't care, but I thought it was interesting that he asked," Jones notes.
To be sure, while employees are a big part of the equation, Summit East isn't as much about them as Kearney sometimes says. He sees a much bigger picture, or at least one that's coming into focus. It's too risky, he knows, to wait until he can make out its exact shape. So Summit East, for all the expense and hard work that have gone into it -- to keep it on budget, Kearney switched the masonry veneer, reconfigured the air-conditioning system, and redesigned the roof -- really just embodies his best guess about what he needs to do to withstand what he believes the future holds. He hasn't spent all that money just because he wants employees to hang around or even because he wants to see his beloved Tallahassee take its rightful place beside RaleighDurham, N.C., as a hotbed of fast-growing technology companies. He's expecting something more from Summit East. Much more.
Kearney has seen the future, and, frankly, as far as Mainline goes, it stinks. The company he's run for the last 10 years couldn't even survive for the next 5.
That much he's sure of. So while he talks up "synergy" and "connectivity" as vital elements of why he's building Summit East, the actual impulse driving him is much more primitive: fear of the unknown. He projects unshakable certainty because he's up against utter uncertainty. And he knows it. "Obviously, a lot of critics will tell you it will be hard or impossible to do something like this," he says. "You can't listen to what everybody tells you. You've got to have patience, faith, and confidence."
He pauses, then adds in a near whisper, "People just aren't believers."
"If local people don't get it, we'll bring in the companies from afar."
Kay Stephenson, who calls Summit East "a wonderful idea," ranks as a nonbeliever. In late 1998 the cofounder and president of Datamaxx Applied Technologies Inc. was shopping around for new office space to accommodate her software company's phenomenal growth. In 1999 its sales rose to $12.5 million, up from $4.4 million the year before. Stephenson is now building a 33,000-square-foot facility -- not at Summit East but at Southwood, the competing development across town, which includes 450 acres zoned for commercial use. "I just felt like if anybody could pull this off, they could," she says, speaking of Arvida.
