Soft Hands

Before mattresses. And long before I ever carried a queen mattress or loaded a truck with old smelly mattresses by myself, I was a business executive. I had a clean, comfy corner office with a view of Portland’s Willamette River. I led sales meetings. I gave PowerPoint presentations. I checked emails every 20 minutes. I sat in on conference calls. I travelled across the country to attend corporate meetings and training sessions. And before that, I was a TV news reporter. Career change over the 25 years since I graduated college was not a new concept for me. But changing from office worker to manual laborer? Now that was a real shock to my system.

During high school and college I always had a job. And I always loved hard work. During high school in Los Angeles I worked in retail, I bagged groceries and I installed signs for a security company. During college I usually had a restaurant job either waiting tables or in the kitchen washing dishes.  

I graduated from UC Berkeley in 1984. I majored in American History. I applied to law schools and got accepted to several. Turns out that law school was the fall back plan for most of my friends graduating with a liberal arts degree and no real career plans. And it turns out that law school just wasn’t for me. So instead I gravitated to my real passion: journalism.

I landed my first news reporting job in a tiny West Virginia town just south of Charleston. I rented a garage apartment near the town of Oak Hill, WV and embarked on what would be a rewarding and truly fun career as a news reporter. That career took me to TV stations across the country and ended in Portland, Oregon at the local ABC affiliate. After 11 years of sometimes exotic travel (Saudi Arabia, Honduras and more) and covering a wide range of events and people it was time for a career change.

In 1997 I took a job as an advertising salesperson for the same ABC station that I’d worked as a reporter.  My job meant a lot more money, but not a lot more fun. My new career was driven by the bottom line. Instead of telling stories and creating images for viewers to watch every evening, I was now working on the money side of the TV business. I learned how to use Excel for the first time. I had an expense account. The companies I worked for had season tickets to NBA games. I entertained clients. I created some clever advertising campaigns. And I learned a lot from my association with the many small business owners that I served. In fact, this was my favorite part of the job – meeting small business owners. From my old career as a news reporter, I had learned how to ask questions and I learned how to listen to the answers.

I always enjoyed hearing the stories that my clients told me about the ups and downs of their businesses. And I was usually impressed by the risks they took and pay-offs they received when everything worked well.

At one point during my years as an ad sales executive, I got a rare opportunity within corporate media to start up a brand new company. Unlike most business start ups, I had a guaranteed salary and the backing of a large corporation.  So I had little to lose if it all failed.

In 2002 I was working for the NBC affiliate in Portland as a national sales rep. My general manager at the time came to me with an assignment. He told me to investigate the idea of starting a Spanish language TV station in Portland.  I dove right in. Before long I developed a business plan, a budget and got a signed agreement with the Univision network. With approval from my company (Belo Media based in Dallas, Texas), I started a Univision affiliate in Portland. Within a year I hired a staff of 12 people and had revenues of $3,000,000 in my third and final year in that position.

I didn’t know it at the time, but that experience starting a new business line while working for a larger company would teach me lessons that are paying off to this day in my mattress business.

The final stop in my career in ad sales was at Comcast Cable TV in Portland. Comcast has a large advertising sales department. I was hired as the General Sales Manager for Oregon and Southern Washington. It’s a solid middle manager position, supervising 40 people, most of them sales people. At the peak I was earning close to $200,000 per year. I had full health insurance, an assistant to manage paperwork and develop presentations for me. I dressed nicely, usually in a suit and tie. We did have casual Fridays – chinos and a nice shirt.

I worked in a downtown office building that was home to at least 100 individual cubicles and a couple dozen offices for the managers. I was hired by a woman who I’d known professionally and as a friend for 15 plus years. When I was hired I was sure this would be an incredible experience working along-side a friend and someone whom I thought I could learn from and grow professionally. It turned out very differently for a variety of reasons. As the years wore on I realized that despite my title and position of authority, I never really had the independence I needed on the job to fully succeed. My boss was a micro-manager and was not willing to allow any of her department hears the latitude they needed to truly lead.

When I wasn’t working the long hour’s necessary to succeed in this kind of job, I was with my wife and two kids. We own a wonderful older home not far from downtown. I was always able to make time for baseball games, soccer games, music recitals and more. At a time when I saw co-workers divorcing on a regular basis and witnessed marital strife due to the stress of over-working bread winners, I had a foundation at home unlike many of my colleagues. My wife remains my best friend and as time went on she would be there for me and our family in ways I had never imagined.

As for my soft hands? Nothing in my previous careers had prepared me for the work that lied ahead.

 

(Photo: Les Lasher and Michael Hanna after unloading a truckload of mattresses 2009)

Desperate Days

Desperate Days

How did I get into the mattress business? It’s not the typical entrepreneurial wanna-be start up. There are no angel investors or venture capitalists looking to help fund an independent mattress store. In fact, at the height of the great recession in 2009, mattress and home furnishing stores were folding on a daily basis. Huge national chains were closing stores and many went bankrupt. Chains likes Wickes were done.

I chose mattresses for several reasons.

Firstly, I am not a techno geek. I was never a math person and I am not a computer person. So there was no way that I was going to invent a new smart phone app or any other kind of technology.

Second, mattresses are simple. The technology used in mattress construction is very basic. And the act of selling a mattress through the retail market is relatively simple. That’s not to say that a mattress business isn’t complicated – it can be – it’s just that mattresses do not require a highly technical skill set to sell in a retail environment.

Third, the financials work. If it’s done right, mattresses can make retailers money; ONLY If the retailer is committed to standing out from the pack through high quality customer service and value pricing.

From my years as an advertising sales executive, I met many furniture store owners. They were my clients. They bought TV advertising to promote their products. In fact, in the Portland, Oregon market, mattress retailers are among the biggest TV advertising spenders. They spend millions. The once successful Mattress World chain of Portland spent approximately $4 million on advertising each year in the Portland market alone. This includes TV, radio and occasional print advertising. That is a fantastic sum for a chain with 15 stores (more on the Mattress World debacle in a future post).

I knew from these retailers that there was money in mattresses. What I didn’t know at the time I was working with these companies as an advertising sales person, is that many of these stores were on thin ice when it came to finances.

With all of that mattress money flowing into TV stations, I sometimes joked with my colleagues that perhaps we should ‘ buy a truckload of mattresses and sell them out of a parking lot over a weekend’ or something like that. All that talk never amounted to much until the day I was out of a job in May 2009.

One evening in August 2009 my wife and I hosted a dinner at our house. Our guests were our friends Steve and Debbie Schneiderman. The Schneidermans live in Coos Bay, Oregon. Steve owns furniture store called Marshfield Bargain House. He’s a third generation retailer with a long history of success in a small Oregon coastal town. Steve mentioned that he heard he could get a truckload of Sealey mattresses from a broker in Portland. At that point I had no job leads and frankly was starting to get nervous about my prospects for landing a ‘real’ job in my old field.

This conversation was the start of something amazing.

 

 

 mattress store portland oregon mattress lot

The Cardboard Box

The Cardboard Box

The H.R. manager handed me a cardboard box. She said, “I put a few more in your office to help you out”.

 

The cardboard box. Light blue and white. One of those boxes you find in most offices, under all the desks to collect paper destined for recycling.

 

It’s 3:00pm on Tuesday May 7^th , 2009, two days after I was told that I no longer have a job at one of the country’s biggest media conglomerates. The HR manager invited me to return to my old office near downtown Portland to collect my personal items collected during my four year stint as an advertising sales manager.

 

I enter the building through the main entrance where the receptionist greets me with a look of pain and a polite “hello” and a hug.  The HR manager escorts me through the cube farm to my old office. A few of my former co-workers gather to watch the spectacle: their former supervisor walking the gauntlet. Now disgraced.  Now discarded.  Now a walking reminder of the fragility of the times.  A weak economy triggering a weak advertising sales climate, triggering the loss of jobs across the country.

 

The HR manager is the consummate professional. She says little. She feigns empathy as I ask questions about health insurance and my final paycheck. She’s done this before. She’s a skilled backstop for the growing needs of a corporate culture driven to shed human capital. One of our former division directors called it “right-sizing” – one of those catch phrases he learned at some conference on “managing change in tough times”.

 

I walk through the cube farm, shake some hands, but mostly walk in silence. I enter the office. There’s a pile of extra boxes in one corner. My family photos are all in place. One of my former colleagues joins me to help with the load up. The photos include a few from past office parties. I studied those for a moment, viewing the forced smile on my face that read “I’d really rather be at home with my family than here yucking it up with clients and division managers”.

 

My book shelf includes a handful of those leadership books that you see in almost all corporate office spaces: “5 Dysfunctions”, “Soar With Your Strenghts”, “Dare to Lead”. I’ve read some of them but can’t frankly remember much of what I read.

 

My heart skips a beat as I pull family photos off the wall. “What am I going to do next?”.

 

The HR manager stands watch. She’s there to make sure I don’t take anything that is proprietary. According to our employee manual, anything I have produced while working here is property of the company. She has her arms folded with a serious gaze. I pick up a little box in which I kept the business cards that I had collected over the years. Many of the cards come from previous workplaces. I think to myself, “these cards could hold the key to my next job”. The cards are a small collection of who’s who in the Portland media industry.

 

As I pick up my cards, the HR manager tells me that she needs to hold onto them. “I need to keep these and check with the division manager before I can release them to you”. I don’t have the energy to argue. She grabs the small box and holds it close to her chest.

 

I finish packing up everything. My work buddy, a fellow manager, grabs some of the boxes. I take an armful. I walk back out of the office, through the cubes. After a brief good bye to a couple of work mates, I’m back in my car and heading home from my former office for the very last time.

 

Once home, I unload the boxes slowly. There’s really no hurry at this point. My wife helps me carry them into the house. I place them in a corner in the basement where they sit for years before I have the nerve to open those boxes again.

We own a mattress store — Who would’ve imagined?

Today is December 18, 2012.  I am carrying a full size mattress down the street. I am 50 years old and I am carrying a 60 pound, connected coil, eco-flex foam model called the Rose Festival Euro Pillow Top mattress in the middle of the street. The destination and the routine is very familiar at this point in my newest career. I am the owner, along with my wife, of a mattress store located in Portland, Oregon. The store is surrounded by a series of apartment buildings. Many of the new residents in these apartments purchase their new mattresses from our store. If I am the only able bodied male in the store at the time, I usually offer to deliver at no-charge, right away.

The walk on this day is about 100 yards down the street. Then inside the building and up the stairs to the second floor. I heave the mattress forward along the narrow hallway. Wait for the customer to open her apartment door and place the mattress inside her apartment. I head back to the store.

At this point we’ve owned the Mattress Lot for almost three years. That’s three years of building something for me and for my entire family. In a few days we will end the year by celebrating accomplishments we never dreamed possible back in our “old” lives. My wife, who has been by my side in this venture since the beginning, and I will soon own the building we’ve been renting for three years and we will hit another new record for gross sales.

We are running a business that three and a half years ago never existed. It’s a business that neither of us knew anything about. Mattresses? Furniture? Retail? Vendors, purchase orders, payroll systems, Yelp reviews, trucks, trucking and truckers. All of these are words we never, ever considered or understood. That is until the day I lost my job and everything changed forever.

(Photo — yes we deliver some mattresses by bike in our neighborhood)