Tuesday, October 19, 2021
I was saddened to hear of the passing of Ken Whitsett. KW was more than my employer for over a decade, he was a mentor to me. In March of 1986, I was just under a year out of the Air Force and Karen and I had moved back to Ocala. I was between employment opportunities (unemployed) and desperate enough to go to an employment agency. The woman there didn't have any opening suitable for me, but she knew of someone who was always looking for good people. She set me up with an appointment with him and that's how I met KW for the first time. He hired me with no real background in the rental business. A year and a half later, he gave me supervision over rental. He was the best teacher of business I could ever find and I learned a lot from him on how to run a business, how to treat customers and how to take care of his employees. He is the yardstick that I compare every employer I have ever worked for since.
He was a true believer in family and KWI became a family to me. There were things he did for my family without me asking that I had never had an employer before or after do. A couple years after I started at KWI, I got visitation restarted with my daughters whose step father had just been stationed at McDill in Tampa. I had been working every Saturday up to that point. He decided to create two Saturday crews, each working every other Saturday, and suddenly I was scheduled off the weekends I had my daughters. The first summer I had them for a week, he came up to me and told me Boot's had put something extra in my check. All of this without me ever asking. That was the kind of man he was.
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