Keith Keingstein has been President of BOSS Facility Services since he founded the company with Kerri Keingstein, in 2001. He has embraced the hands-on role, utilizing his expertise in the facility maintenance field to deliver superior service to clients for the past decade. Prior to BOSS, Keith grew up in the family HVAC business. After attending Dowling College School of Business, he returned to the family business, run by his father, Bob. Keith then completed a three year apprenticeship with the Local 638 Steamfitters before becoming a journeyman technician in the field.
Fulfilling the need for an end-to-end service provider for service maintenance, BOSS is built on Keith's technical expertise and ability to pre-qualify vendors to offer top notch service and headache-free solutions. It's his technical knowledge that sets BOSS apart from other facility maintenance companies, living up to his goal of becoming not just a service provider but an extension of the client.
From day one, we set out to provide better service, and I think we've done that. But I think we also bring experience to the table. Part of what we pride ourselves on is our ability to find solutions for our clients. We can't do that if we don't know what we're doing. Expertise and communication are the two driving factors for total client satisfaction.
I started the company with Kerri, and honestly — I wouldn't actually tell her this — she's been pretty instrumental in keeping things going on our end. She has been the one to handle the administration side of things from the beginning and I've handled the technical side, and it's worked well. Bringing in Dad (Bob) was a no-brainer. I was 26 when we started the company and he brought a lot of credibility to the company and helped assure clients that we knew what we were doing. Kevin's done everything here, from answering phones and putting together desks to recruiting vendors and running the PM department.
After graduating apprenticeship school, being a journeymen tech and ultimately a consultant in the industry, I noticed that clients with multiple locations — either regionally or nationally — had entire departments devoted to finding vendors. Worse, they didn't know what they were looking for. You can't just open the phone book and hire the first tech you find. You need to make sure that they're qualified and insured and are affiliated with the right organizations... there's all kinds of things you need to ask before you find the right person. They didn't know what those were, but I did, and I recognized that this was something all companies dealt with. They needed to outsource this type of work to somebody who knew the right questions to ask. BOSS was born out of that.
Free time? [laughs] I don't have any free time. I have two kids (Juliette and Cooper) and a wonderful wife Kristi and this company. I don't have free time. But it's been fun. It's worth it. I'm kinda like the Dad around here and then I go home and it's the same thing. I enjoy surfing, boating and spending time with the family... what can be better than that?