June 2013 Web Extra: ‘Take off Saturdays’

If Gary Mallory, CEO of Albuquerque, N.M.-based Heads Up Landscape Contractors, has one piece of advice for other landscape executives, it’s to balance the business with the personal.

Landscape Management featured Heads Up in a feature story about 40th anniversaries the 2013 LM150 supplement, in which the company was named No. 79 on the list of the industry’s largest 150 firms.

“I’ve seen some people be awesome for about 10 years,” he says. “They work too much and get divorced, miss their kid’s first soccer goal or parent-teacher conference. If the goal is to last 40 years, you have to take weekends off, take family vacations in the summer and take time off during the day for parent-teacher conferences. If you don’t keep that balance, you’ll never make it or you’ll have such a lousy quality of life it’s not worth it.”

Mallory learned that lesson early on.

“There was an old guy, kind of a mentor, that told me to take off weekends,” Mallory says. “He said, ‘If you work Saturdays you’re not going to retire one day earlier than if you don’t. But if you don’t see your kid’s first soccer goal, you can never make up for that.’ I’ve found that to be true. I cannot believe how many people I see that forget that. It has tragic consequences.”