Live and Learn: Losing Everything

                            Eight years after all his employees walked out and the IRS took his Escalade, Bob Keating is back in the saddle.

Everything changed in one day for Bob Keating.

Keating started a commercial landscaping company 20 years ago and grew it to 150 employees with offices throughout Florida. He had 60 trucks and a 10,000-square-foot building. His crews installed the landscaping at almost all the Home Depots in Florida, Georgia and some in Texas.

Then, late one Sunday night, the general manager called Keating and told him he quit. The next day, none of Keating’s employees showed up to work. They were all working for the GM.

“He got them to quit with no notice; he hired them,” Keating says. “I had no mow crews.”

Then, to make matters worse, the IRS came in and started investigating the books. It seems Keating was on the hook for a lot of back taxes.

That GM had turned on Keating, selling to his client base and spreading lies that made his managers quit. Now he’s in business just down the road from Keating’s new office.

“I went from driving an Escalade to driving a rusty pickup that the IRS loaned me to drive home in,” he says. “I lost my house that I built.”

Now, Keating’s new company, Liberty Land Management Group, Palm Harbor, Fla., does $2 million a year, all in commercial work – condos and apartments. Keating, the president, started it seven years ago with new goals: no debt, stay small, keep tabs on everything.

“I’ve learned – before I had 30 managers, and now I’m the manager,” Keating says. “I gave a general manager way too much power.”

But Keating – a former Marine and bodybuilder – took it all in stride. “Such is life,” he says. “I knew I couldn’t fail. I had to build it again.”

So, Keating started back at zero. He hadn’t run a mower in 15 years, and was now maintaining entire complexes by himself. His old irrigation manager, a 74-year-old named Earl, started helping him. Keating worked seven days a week to rebuild his business.

One account, a mobile home park with 500 units, took him and Earl a day and a half to do. For eight months, he worked with a fractured back, trimming with tears running down his face.

“We had to have money,” he says.

Now, he’s back to having big crews, just fewer of them. He has 20 employees, all of whom have more than a dozen years experience.

He says he still loves the work, but has learned that he needs to step away occasionally, before he starts hating it. 

 “You burn out. You get to a point where you hate your company. I wanted no part of that anymore. I didn’t want to hate my company,” he says. “I’m focused when I’m supposed to be.”

Keating, a Cape Cod native, avoids burning out by heading to his boat. Three weekends a month, he, his wife and step-son go fishing for snook, trout, sharks and groupers.

“As soon as I leave my dock, I’m looking at that ocean. You take a sigh of relief,” he says. “I don’t think about work, I don’t think about money issues. You think about doing the right thing on the boat.”

Before he got the boat, his Fridays went like this: He and his wife would load up a cooler, process all the time cards and prepare for Monday. There was never any time away from the business.

“She looked at me and said, ‘You need to get a boat again,’” Keating says.

So he put down $50,000 in cash for a new 23-foot dual console Pro-Line – really a sound business investment. “It was the best thing I ever did. I’m so refreshed, I’m so focused because my mind is clear.”

The author is associate editor of Lawn & Landscape. Have a great Live & Learn story? Send it to cbowen@gie.net.