Janet Sullivan, who oversaw Lenmar Wood Finishes for nearly 40 years, retired Aug. 1.
Sullivan stayed with the company after Lenmar was purchased by Gemini last year to ensure a smooth transition process. “She has been a critical asset in this process and has now earned a well-deserved retirement,” Gemini stated. Julie Russell now takes over as director of Gemini’s Floor Finish Division, which includes Lenmar and Glitsa wood floor finishes, and Jeremy Farmer assumes the role of technical sales representative for Gemini’s floor coatings division.
After earning a degree in accounting from the University of Maryland, Sullivan worked at Montgomery Ward before taking a position at Lenmar. "I joined Lenmar in March of '84 doing accounting and bookkeeping, and we had two guys in the sales department who were elderly and weren't going out and making sales calls. The company asked, 'Do you want to try it?' I did, and the guy I was shadowing ended up dying. I was like, 'What do I do now?', and that's when I leaned on the distributors to help me."
In the early years of her career, there were few women involved in the wood flooring industry, she says, and she did everything possible to educate herself about the industry and the chemistry of wood flooring finishes, even going so far as to take a college chemistry class. "I can remember one time early on when a customer called in and was asking me all kinds of questions, and after I answered them, he said, "Huh, you didn’t do so bad for a girl." It was things like that where I had to prove myself first, where if I had been a man I wouldn't have had to."
When Sullivan was a student at the NOFMA school in Memphis in the late '80s, and at that time women weren’t allowed to run the edger during the class. "People like Mike Sundell, Bill Price Sr. and Mac [McGlaughlin] from Powernail took me aside after class and let me run all the machines. I don’t think I would have stayed in the business if it weren’t for people like that," she says.
After one month of retirement, "It's the customers I miss," Sullivan says. "Throughout my career I was also selling into the furniture and cabinet business, and I used to call on the distributors on that side, too, but I always liked the wood flooring side better because of the people," Sullivan says. "And I always felt like every year at Expo it was like a family reunion." Sullivan recalls one year when the event was in Orlando, and her then-teenage daughter had been at the pool with a friend. An industry colleague mentioned to Sullivan that they had seen her daughter at the pool having chicken tenders and a Sprite. When Sullivan saw her daughter later, she asked her how her chicken tenders and Sprite were, much to her daughter's surprise. Sullivan’s daughter would also babysit during the conventions for some of her customers’ children.
Sullivan says that she and her husband, Mike, plan to be on the move in retirement, continuing to travel the U.S. in their RV and also, with the added free time retirement affords, traveling internationally.
Janet Sullivan and her husband Mark plan to travel even more now that she has retired; here they are pictured at the Hot Air Balloon Fiesta in Albuquerque, N.M., last October.
