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Family & friends
Lee Kennedy at the silver anniversary party with daughter,
Shaila, now vice president and retired bookkeeper Cathleen
Graham.
Couldn’t have done it without
them
Jim and Larry Miller from Salem Glass Company along with Beth
Rooks and Lewis Mulfelder from Bergmeyer Associates, Inc.
help LKCo celebrate 25 years.
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Boston was just recovering from the havoc caused
by the worst blizzard in New England’s history when Lee
Kennedy went to the bank—with the deed to his house in
hand—to secure financing for his new business. The previous
company where Kennedy worked had been standing on shaky ground
and the week-long disarray caused by the Blizzard of ‘78
was the final straw. Operations folded. Left without an employer,
Kennedy decided it was time to strike out on his own. Like
a phoenix rising from the snowstorm, so to speak, Lee Kennedy
Co., Inc. was born.
“I ran the Company from the trunk of my
car,” Kennedy reminisces. Equipped with a princess car
phone in the console (an absolute novelty in those days) and
a cardboard file storage box in the trunk, that car was the
initial corporate HQ for Lee Kennedy Co., Inc.
Kennedy, now Chairman of Lee Kennedy Co., admits
his new venture was risky. The roof over not only his head,
but his 3 kids’, was on the line. “It was a gamble,”
remembers Kennedy, “but I’ve always lived true to
the expression, ‘behold the turtle. He only makes progress
when he sticks his neck out.’”
“At the end of my first year, I had exceeded
the profit goal I had set for myself nearly five-fold,”
remembers Kennedy. “I was able to hire staff and things
began to build from there.”
“It wasn’t always easy back then,”
jests Kennedy, “I had a company to oversee and a family
to run—or was it the other way around? I was a one man
hockey dad, soccer mom and chief domestic administrator,”
recalls Kennedy. “I acquired a lot of speeding tickets
in those days!”
Family and friends have always been the backbone
of the Company. Long, long before Bob McCluskey became CEO
of Lee Kennedy Co., his sisters baby-sat young Lee Michael,
Shaila and Eugene. “Bobby’s almost like one of my
own,” notes Kennedy, “he was a part of the family
before becoming a part of the business.”
As the Company transitions into the next generation,
Kennedy admits to experiencing some separation anxiety. “As
the parent to both my grown children, and the Company, it’s
hard sometimes to step back but I have full faith in their
leadership,” Kennedy explains. Lee Michael is president
of the Company, Shaila was recently promoted to vice president
and Eugene is a project executive.
Less than 30% of family-owned businesses survive
to the next generation. Even fewer companies, family or not,
survive more than 25 years. “We’re fortunate in
that we’ve figured out how to be a company and a family,”
observes Lee Michael Kennedy. “Our success as a family-run
company is due to the support we all have for one another.”
To mark the Company’s 25th birthday, clients,
architects, subcontractors, current staff and past employees
celebrated at Atlas Bar and Grille in Boston on March 13th.
Kennedy was presented with a time capsule of the Company’s
promotional materials spanning the last 25 years. Shaila Kennedy
spearheaded the effort to assemble the items from the deepest
corners of employees’ closets. “I can’t believe
we used to make shirts like this,” she comments in regards
to a neon LKCo T-shirt, “but I guess it was the 80’s.”
Regardless of Lee Kennedy Co.’s fashion
sense, the Company’s quality end product has never wavered.
“The inception of the Company came from the idea that
Boston needed a general contractor that was in tune with the
client—one that created a partnership with the client,
not a rivalry,” says Kennedy, “I’m happy to
say that we’ve been building partnerships for 25 years.”
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