Michael McK­eag, Pres­i­dent and CEO

“I didn’t want to become an expert at just one thing or one par­tic­u­lar area,” says Pres­i­dent and CEO Michael McKeag.

As a life­long learn­er and son of a teacher, who loves to get his hands dirty, his inter­ests lie deep in all facets of busi­ness. All facets for Mike means cre­at­ing busi­ness plans, review­ing income state­ments, cre­at­ing fiber­glass molds, etc.…literally, all facets.

A grad­u­ate of Luther Col­lege, Mike received his degree in Account­ing with a minor in Eco­nom­ics. Dur­ing and after achiev­ing CPA sta­tus, he prac­ticed tax account­ing spe­cial­iz­ing in merg­ers and acquisitions.

But, not want­i­ng to be ​“an expert in just one thing” he jumped at an oppor­tu­ni­ty to bring his love of busi­ness and num­bers to the Lat­i­tude team and to return to Poweshiek Coun­ty. After learn­ing the busi­ness, he had the chance to part­ner with Tom Latimer on the devel­op­ment of an entire­ly new busi­ness, from the ground up. Image­First™ LLC, a whole­sale exte­ri­or man­u­fac­tur­ing com­pa­ny, had been Mike’s pri­ma­ry focus until about 7 years ago when he was asked to take on the President/​CEO role of Latimer Group in its entirety.

Tom Latimer com­ment­ed, ​“Mike is the right per­son, at the right time to take the lead at Lat­i­tude-Latimer Group and Image­First. He has a strong and flu­id finan­cial mind, under­stands the man­u­fac­tur­ing process and appre­ci­ates the impor­tance of sales and mar­ket­ing. More­over, he respects the Company’s employ­ee and cus­tomer ori­ent­ed cul­ture. His qui­et but effec­tive approach to prob­lem solv­ing allows for oth­ers to feel com­fort­able in a col­lec­tive deci­sion mak­ing process.”

“Strate­gic and method­i­cal growth” are Mike’s main goals as the leader of the Latimer Group. This is a big vague goal, but break­ing it down to our peo­ple, our depart­ments (Sales, Project Man­age­ment, Design, Pro­duc­tion, and Instal­la­tion) and core regions (Col­orado, Wyoming, Nebras­ka, Iowa, and Illi­nois) it starts to come together.

Con­tin­ued Growth

“Grow­ing our peo­ple through train­ing and focus groups helps enhance our ver­sa­til­i­ty by uti­liz­ing new tech­nol­o­gy, process­es, and inno­v­a­tive think­ing which increas­es the capa­bil­i­ties of all of our regions,” says Mike. ​“All of this must hap­pen while main­tain­ing qual­i­ty prod­ucts and the integri­ty of the lev­el of ser­vice we pro­vide to our customers.

“The future looks great, we’ve weath­ered tough times and come out suc­cess­ful on the oth­er side,” Mike con­tin­ued. ​“We are for­tu­nate to have great cus­tomers, an excel­lent team, and look for­ward to con­tin­ued growth.”

Mike and his wife Cara enjoy trav­el­ing to vis­it fam­i­ly (five chil­dren alto­geth­er), liv­ing on a small hob­by farm, live music, and vaca­tions that are warm and sunny!

Mike’s words to live by are: ​“The best abil­i­ty is avail­abil­i­ty. It’s not hard to make deci­sions once you know what your val­ues are.”