After 30 years of working in the St. Louis floor covering industry, Mike Hart decided to shelve his large customer list and retire in 1999. Not too long after it became official, he knew he'd left too early.
His wife knew, too. After one year of the lifestyle, she looked at him and said, "I don't think this will work." Fortunately for her, Ambassador Floor Co., headquartered in Chesterfield, Mo., was aggressively recruiting Hart off his recliner. President Kelly Taylor's courtship was relentless. "Kelly needed someone with more gray hairs than he had," Hart says.
The retiree laced up his work boots once more and agreed to join the team. He's been working on the company's bottom line ever since. Hart invited Hardwood Floors magazine to spend a day with him in April, on the Monday before the National Wood Flooring Association Expo kicked off in downtown St. Louis. As VP, Hart's days involve wearing many hats and keeping tabs on his staff.
5:36 a.m.
Hart has been up for about a half hour. He's eating breakfast and checking his emails. The junk gets deleted and any to-dos get logged into his Google calendar.
The company's project managers are already inspecting their first job site of the day or are en route. The company has six project managers—its "A-listers," Hart says. The project managers have all been groomed upward through the company's training programs. They are the best of the best.
Until the production manager begins his shift, Hart makes himself available to project managers who run into problems on their job sites in the morning.
Today, a project manager calls Hart at 5:36 a.m. He tells Hart a house is showing a peculiar moisture spike in the hallway. The project manager is worried it won't be ready for 3,500 square feet of wood flooring later in the week. Hart reminds him that it rained hard over the weekend and ventilating the space for three days will get the moisture back to normal. Hart tells the project manager to continue as planned.
5:58 a.m.
Dave Pearson, production manager, arrives at Ambassador Floor and starts his day. He's checking in with all the project managers. By now, most of the project managers have traveled to their first job sites or are en route to their second job site of the day.
Ambassador Floor's headquarters is in Chesterfield, Mo., a stretch of land west of St. Louis that was once covered by 20 feet of water during a flood in 1993.
On this particular day, the company's project managers will visit 45 job sites. Ambassador Floor's business is in selling and installing floor coverings for newly constructed buildings—more than 70 percent of its annual revenue comes from selling and installing floors in newly built residential homes. Today, the number of active job sites is on the high end of average. Typically, the amount of job sites ranges from 35–45.
Still at home, Hart is mindful of his phone. If a project manager notices anything that needs adjusting, Pearson calls Hart to approve the change order. Pearson logs any changes or advisories from the project managers into Ambassador Floor's project management software, which notifies the installers via text or email.
6:32 a.m.
Ambassador Floor trucks begin delivering flooring material from the company's warehouse to the job sites.
6:59 a.m.
Ambassador Floor's installers have arrived at their job sites. The installers' days begin with "nailers on the ground," as Ambassador Floor staff put it, at 7 a.m.
Hart gets into the office around 7 a.m., and immediately checks his emails and calls about anything that needs his immediate attention.
Hart gets in the office a little before 7 a.m., as well. The company has changed locations twice since Taylor's father, a longtime friend of Hart's, founded the company in 1985. It moved to its current facility, measuring 57,000 square feet, in 2002. In fact, the building shares a lot line with the National Wood Flooring Association.
The facility, the company's headquarters, is essentially one huge room. The administrative employees have their desks perched on a lofted second level that overlooks the showroom floor on the first.
The openness combined with the building's high ceilings means the workspace isn't library-quiet. As more and more employees trickle in, the noise of work picks up—fingers typing, phone chatter, laughter, a humming radio somewhere in the background.
The office level is divided into cubicles. Upper management, like Hart and Taylor, have offices.
Hart begins checking his email and asks Pearson for updates about today's jobs.
8:40 a.m.
Ambassador Floor is a two-story building with an open floor plan. The employees work on the second floor, which overlooks the showroom on the first floor.
Hart is walking around the showroom floor and about to head back to his office when he's stopped by Ambassador Floor Account Executive Mike Lee. Lee has been with the company for 19 years and is an NWFACP-certified inspector. He tells Hart about a client complaint he has been dealing with recently. The process is winding down and ends today, but not how the company would have preferred—all 3,000 square feet of flooring the company installed in the client's $1 million home is being ripped out, he says.
9:57 a.m.
Hart uses new software to supervise where his installer teams are located throughout the day.
Since talking with Lee, Hart has been in his office checking his email. Around 10 a.m., he takes a look at the whereabouts of his installers. The company installed new floor covering business management software 18 months ago. In addition to transmitting schedules and notifications directly to the company's installers, the software also allows Hart to track where they are at any given time during the workday.
He opens the software and an interface appears showing a map of the St. Louis metro dotted with tokens. It looks like Google Maps, but those tokens aren't points of interest. Each one represents an installer's location in real time. Today there are 65 installers out in the field—that's a lot of tokens.
10:23 a.m.
Hart pores over the company's finances. He enjoys this part of his job immeasurably. Taped to the door of a cabinet in his office are three $1 bills—each is a betting prize he won when his business insights won out over the company accountants' formulas.
No formula can beat experience and a retentive memory. Hart's been in the industry for almost 50 years by now. In his last 15 with Ambassador Floor, he has witnessed the company grow and prosper during the early 2000s, and fight to stay afloat as 35 percent of its business walked out during the recession. He saw Ambassador Floor survive, and its annual revenues return to around $20 million on average.
So as he looks at the company's new orders and orders in process, he can quickly and accurately determine the manpower, inventory and cash needed to fulfill them. If there's an anomaly, he's most likely seen it before. He identifies it and brings it immediately to Taylor's attention. Today, nothing is off.
12:05 p.m.
Hart and Taylor get lunch nearby at Longhorn Steakhouse. They come here often and the waitress knows them by name.
1:18 p.m.
Hart is driving across the Missouri River to St. Charles, Mo., to check out the flooring installation on a new home in a subdivision. His phone starts ringing, so he answers it on a Bluetooth headset. Any employee who drives during his or her shift receives a Bluetooth headset from the company, Hart says, so they don't have to juggle holding a phone and the steering wheel at the same time.
The caller is a man from a hardwood flooring supplier who wants Hart to buy his product. Because of Ambassador Floor's size, Hart receives many calls like these from suppliers trying to make a deal direct. Hart is the gatekeeper of the company, he says, and if he likes what he hears, he'll bring the deal to Taylor.
Hart tells the caller he's away from his desk, but will get back to him later in the week.
1:43 p.m.
Ambassador Floor employees on the job site tell Hart there were a lot of shorts in the wood flooring product they're installing.
Hart drives into the Hawk Ridge subdivision, where a number of his guys are installing floors in multiple houses today. Builders like Ambassador Floor because they can install fast. The company achieves that through training and numbers—85 union flooring installers are on its payroll. Not a single installation job is subcontracted, Hart says.
He parks his car in front of one such house and enters through the garage. There's an open-door policy between employees and management—they can see Hart in his office and Hart can go meet them on the job site. While Hart doesn't get out to as many sites as he'd like, he enjoys stopping in. Inside, one of his crews is installing 1,700 square feet of 5-inch-wide oak flooring. Hart and the crew make small talk while Hart looks over the job site. They tell him there were a high number of shorts in the flooring delivered to the house.
2:32 p.m.
Hart and three other Ambassador Floor employees, including president Taylor, discuss flooring products during a quarterly meeting with one of the company's biggest suppliers.
After driving back to the office, Hart sits down with Taylor, Lee and another Ambassador Floor employee for a quarterly meeting with representatives from one of Ambassador Floors' biggest suppliers.
Taylor and Hart describe issues they've had with the supplier's products recently—hickory products aren't acclimating properly, dark-stained flooring has lighter tongues that are visible after installation, lots of shorts in each shipment and more.
The colleagues from the two companies also share a lot of inside jokes across the table.
3:05 p.m.
The meeting is over and Hart gets ready to travel into St. Louis with Lee to discuss upcoming revisions to the NWFA Installation Guidelines.
5:10 p.m.
Hart talks about running a large retail and installation company with managers from another large company, Flooring Solutions, over drinks the day before the NWFA Expo.
Hart and Lee sit down at a table in the Renaissance Hotel bar in downtown St. Louis. Joining them is Ken Ervin and Alan Blake, Flooring Services LLC; and Brett Miller, NWFA's vice president of education and certification.
All five men dive into conversation about how new home construction practices do not always jive with the Installation Guidelines. Hart says that Guidelines must be updated to recognize new construction installation procedures, even when directly contradicting what they have always said.
Miller responds that he has only just begun discussing the guidelines with the National Association of Home Builders and other large flooring contractors from around the country and that these topics are exactly what the NWFA will be evaluating as the process moves forward. The meeting ends after 30 minutes and Miller leaves; Hart, Lee, Ervin and Blake stay a little longer to talk about their businesses over drinks.
When the stories are exhausted, Hart stands up and says goodbye. He's going home to a warm dinner cooked by his wife, and he can't be late.
