Jim Roberts

Jim Roberts

REMEMBRANCES

born salesman and motivator

George Bushong initially balked the afternoon in 1984 when his golfing buddy, Jim Roberts, asked him to run the sales division of Staff Leasing, a startup employee-outsourcing firm Roberts had recently co-founded.

For starters, the business had just moved out of another co-founder's garage in Bradenton. What's more, Bushong took a look at Roberts' golf shoes and noticed the soles were held together with masking tape.

"I think I'll just pass on working for you," Bushong remembers saying, thinking this operation didn't have much of a chance. "If Jim hadn't been such a wild success, that would be a real sad story."

Bushong, who now runs his own Bradenton-based human resources and employee-leasing firm, ultimately did go to work for Roberts. And the venture indeed turned out to be wildly successful. Roberts and his cohorts grew Staff Leasing to one of the largest employee leasing companies in the country before selling it in a multimillion dollar deal to the company that's currently known as Gevity, the Lakewood Ranch-based publicly traded human resources firm.

Roberts, widely known by peers and colleagues as the motivating force behind Bushong and the rest of the sales force of Staff Leasing, died March 2 of Parkinson's disease. He was 79.

"He gave of his time and he gave of his money," says Bushong, the chairman of Administrative Concepts Corp. "He was just one hell of a nice guy."

And Staff Leasing was more than just the predecessor company to Gevity. In 1992, for example, the company ranked 345th on Inc. magazine's national list of the Top 500 fastest growing companies. And by expanding product lines to include services such as health insurance and accounting, Staff Leasing helped create the billion-dollar nationwide industry now referred to as PEOs (professional employee organizations).

While Staff Leasing was Roberts' most well-known business accomplishment, it wasn't his only one. After Roberts and his wife, Pat, moved to Bradenton from Syracuse, N.Y. in 1976 to escape the Central New York winters, the couple noticed that mobile home parks were as plentiful on the Gulf Coast as lake effect snow was up North.

So Roberts started his own mobile home repair and refurbishing business and eventually grew it to include sales of new homes. And the name of that company, Happy Homes, was indicative of the way Roberts lived his life, not just a product he was selling. Says Bushong: "He was a great joke teller."

Roberts, a graduate of Le Moyne College in Syracuse, served two tours with the U.S. Army in the Korean War before embarking on his business career. And after moving to Bradenton, he became involved in several charities in the area, including Sertoma, Meals on Wheels, Manatee Religious Services, Habitat for Humanity, Kid's Klub, the Women's Resource Center and Art Center Manatee.

Roberts is survived by his wife, Pat, to whom he was married for 38 years, in addition to his eight grown children, 16 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

-Mark Gordon