Sy Israel, octogenarian entrepreneur

If you want to keep up with Seymour (Sy) Israel these days, do the following:

1. Walk briskly for three and a half miles each morning in his College Park neighborhood.

2. Eat healthy. Watch your weight.

3. Get to your office by 10 a.m., where you preside as founder/chairman.

4. Oversee, along with your company president/son, the latest developments of a $45 million-plus firm you began by yourself (with an old pickup truck) more than half a century ago.

5. During the day you check in on some of your 400 family members – they’re family to you, not employees.

6. Walk the walk for your faith by devoting time and talent to national and international Jewish causes, including being the first president of the JCC Central Florida and overseeing the opening of the first JCC center in Maitland.

7. Plan your next Caribbean adventure on your ocean-going sailboat. Don’t worry about hiring a crew, you sail solo (with your wife Debra).

8. Briefly contemplate your retirement in about 12 years. You’re 82, but so what? Lots of good years left. Lots to do.

This is Sy Israel’s life, and he loves every moment of it. On any given day, you will see his slender, compact form working behind his office desk at Orlando’s Universal Engineering Sciences’ sprawling headquarters on Maggie Boulevard, but, more likely, strolling the halls, chatting up department heads, or out in the large equipment lot, talking with maintenance workers. Sy’s office is across the hall from his son Mark’s. Their doors are always open to each other and to anyone who needs to talk to either of them. That’s the way Sy has operated since the birth of his business 51 years ago.

“You look people straight in the eye and then you do more than you say you’ll do,” is a Sy truism. He has others, and means them all. Universal’s guiding principle, “Do whatever it takes,” is on the firm’s wall.

Sy Israel may have literally started at the bottom, cleaning out his first client’s septic tank on Merritt Island, but the firm has expanded dynamically ever since, to the point that it is the largest family-owned geotechnical company in the country. Universal Engineering provides a wide variety of services for the development and building industries, from soil and materials testing and tunnel building to excavating and relocating endangered gopher tortoises from construction sites. The company’s 18 branch offices stretch from Miami to Atlanta, as well as most of Florida in between.

“We’ve has a lot of offers to sell the company” the senior Israel said, as son Mark nodded in agreement. “Some of our competitors have sold to corporations for one reason or another. Mark has grown up in the business and understands, like I do, that our clients and our employees are our friends.”

Growing up in the office taught Mark a thing or two about family business.

“I recall as a kid sitting in the cabs of the equipment in the storage lot,” Mark said. “I loved it.”

“I suppose,” he added, “If dad had been a florist, I might have been a florist too.”