Mike Regan’s path to heading one of the largest landscaping firms in San Diego started with mowing neighbors’ lawns while he was going to high school in San Diego. To this day, that work was the foundation of a business model that sustains itself through ups and downs of the economy.
“Grass always grows no matter what the economy is doing,” said Regan, who is CEO of Pacific Green Landscape and a member of Sage Executive Group’s Integrus Forum.
He started the company in 1983, and over the 36 years it has grown and evolved, starting with maintenance and installation work, moving into contracts with apartment complexes and then in the last decade concentrating on services for homeowners associations. Today, Regan says the company’s work is about 55 percent with HOAs, and the rest with industrial, commercial and multi-family apartments.
After high school, Regan studied ornamental horticulture at Cuyamaca College in El Cajon and Cal State Poly at San Luis Obispo before starting his own business. He says that “landscaping is not my better half” and what’s important as CEO of a company with about 200 employees is that “I understand how business runs fairly well.” The demands of job include keeping on top of environmental regulations, workplace requirements and immigration rules for many of his workers who cross the border each day from Mexico and need to have proper documentation. One of his key moves was to invest in a captive insurance company as a cost-effective way to cover insurance needs.
“New rules and regulations are always coming down,” he said. “I don’t mind them in general as long as they make good sense in the way they are enforced.” He paused to note, “sometimes they don’t.”
Now 59, he has been married to his wife, Sue, for 33 years. They have two grown daughters, Holly, a junior high school teacher in Oceanside and Amanda, a post-doctoral Ph.D. in music technology at Southern Methodist University. On weekends, he still finds time to play golf in the morning.
After more than three decades of investing time and energy in his company, he says the biggest reward is “the group of people I’ve put together.”