Bryan Park Of Footprints Floors: Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Began Leading My Company

Probably the most important thing I’ve learned over the years, and the thing that everyone should learn as early as possible is that you have to be intentional about spending time with your family. If you don’t make a point of being present and holding that part of your life as sacred, it will fly by, and you can never get it back.

As part of our series called “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Began Leading My Company” I had the pleasure of interviewing Bryan Park.

Bryan Park, CEO and founder of Footprints Floors, the 150-plus-unit flooring franchise, was recently appointed to the Board of Directors for the National Wood Flooring Association (NWFA). The association is an impactful part of the community, and its appointment of Park as a valued member shows what a force of nature he and Footprints Floors are in the industry.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! What was the “Aha Moment” that led to the idea for your current company? Can you share that story with us?

Truthfully, Footprints Floors was not born from any kind of Aha Moment. There was never a moment where I said, “This is such a great idea for a company!” Rather, it was forced upon us. In 2008, I was laid off from my job finishing floors. I had a two-year-old and an eight-months-pregnant wife. I needed to pay my bills, so I did what I knew how to do: flooring. I just did it on my own.

If there was an Aha Moment, it was a couple of years later when I realized, through experience, that this industry doesn’t have a lot of steep competition. If you show up on time and do what you say you are going to do, that puts you head and shoulders above the other guys. Realizing that opened up a lot of doors for us.

Can you tell us a story about the hard times you faced when you started your journey? Did you ever consider giving up? Where did you get the drive to continue even though things were so hard?

I can’t say I’ve ever thought about giving up, but there were many hard times. We went our first two months without any revenue. Again, I had a two-year-old and a pregnant wife. We had bills to pay and were trying to get a new business off the ground in a recession. I worked six and a half days a week for the first year. My wife was answering phones while juggling our kids. Our clients would hear our baby crying in the background of calls. But we embraced it. We never doubted what we were doing. So it was stressful, but that stress came from the amount of work we had to do, not from a place of anxiety or doubt. We have always been driven by our faith. We believe the lord carries us, and that belief has helped us avoid a tremendous amount of anxiety. If He is with us, who can be against us?

So, how are things going today? How did your grit and resilience lead to your eventual success?

Things are going extremely well for us today. All the grit and hard work that got us through those early days resulted in a rock-solid foundation for our business. We are lean, mean and very profitable. Our model is nimble, which is very attractive to prospective franchise owners. There is no brick-and-mortar shop, no employees and very little overhead. That allows us to offer an extremely low upfront investment, which our franchise owners often recoup in just their first eight or nine months.

What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

In the flooring industry, it isn’t hard to stand out. We show up on time, we call people back, and we do what we say we are going to do. And that has been enough to make us a leader in our segment. There really is no magic to it. I’ve done probably 12,000 estimates, and I must have been asked 9,000 times why the prospective client should choose us. My answer is always that we are good at what we do, but more importantly, we do exactly what we say we are going to do. No surprises. And if anything goes wrong, we make it right. That’s our not-so-secret sauce.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you first started? Can you tell us what lessons or ‘takeaways’ you learned from that?

We had our first difficult customer in one of our earliest projects — probably like our fourth job ever. Even today, this customer would stand out as a tough one, but back then, we were still trying to figure things out, and it was just a nightmare. I was working the job with the help of my brother-in-law. Towards the end of the job, my brother-in-law was setting a toilet while I was settling up with the customer, then I heard screaming and swearing from the bathroom. I ran in there to see what was happening, and the toilet bowl had slipped and smashed his finger. It was bleeding, and he was cursing and shouting. Worse, he had punched a hole in their wall!

That one cost us a lot of money to make right. Today, my brother-in-law is a pastor, and I like to remind him of that low moment every once in a while.

My big takeaway from that experience is that things happen. We operate in a world of chaos. Every once in a while, your soon-to-be-a-pastor brother-in-law will put his fist through a customer’s wall. And if it’s not that, it’s something else. What separates a good business owner from a bad one is how they react to those situations. We don’t profess to be perfect, but we promise to make things right if anything goes wrong. That’s the best you can do.

Often leaders are asked to share the best advice they received. But let’s reverse the question. Can you share a story about advice you’ve received that you now wish you never followed?

One of the themes of my life has been bucking conventional wisdom, so it’s hard to think of a time when I took anyone’s advice that didn’t work out. Of course, there are always lessons to learn. When I worked for a flooring company before starting my own, the company stopped paying me for months. I trusted that if I kept meeting my obligation, eventually they would meet theirs, but I was wrong. I don’t regret being a trusting person, but in this case, it didn’t work out for me.

You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

1. Integrity. Our entire model is based on that point of differentiation I mentioned earlier: just showing up and doing what you say you are going to do. C.S. Lewis said his definition of integrity is doing the right thing even when no one is watching, and we take that to heart.
2. Trusting in reason. You must believe in the data and results you see and act accordingly. That can be harder than it sounds. You can’t just go by gut. When we went national a few years ago, it cost us $500,000 to take that leap. It felt like a tremendous risk, but our model was sound, and the numbers we saw made sense, so we took that leap of faith.
3. Putting people first. If you love and respect other people, you can build something great. And I don’t mean this in any sort of karmic sense like good things will come back to you. I mean that if you run a business for yourself, you are inevitably going to run it by yourself. This philosophy has helped us retain employees while our competitors struggle with labor.

Which tips would you recommend to your industry colleagues to help them thrive and not “burn out”?

I am naturally inclined to be a strong delegate. I love to surround myself with experts better at all sorts of things than I am, and then I hand off work to them. I like to give people ownership over projects and let them run with it. 99 times out of 100, they do a better job than I could have.

I also encourage every entrepreneur to be intentional about creating free time and doing things they enjoy. As business owners, it’s easy to fall into the trap of waiting for time to open up before you take a vacation or even just get dinner with a friend. You have to be intentional; you must put these things on your calendar and stick to them. You have to say, “I’m going golfing this weekend no matter what my pile of work looks like.”

What are the most common mistakes you have seen CEOs & founders make when they start a business? What can be done to avoid those errors?

Too many CEOs are focused exclusively on today or exclusively on tomorrow, but to succeed, you have to find that sweet spot of considering both the now and the future. When I was building the business, I was sanding floors, moving furniture, getting yelled at, and I was determined to do the job right, but I was also thinking about the future of the business, asking what it could and should look like in five years and how we could get there. To succeed, you need to be dedicated both to what you are working on today and to laying out your path for the future.

In your experience, which aspect of running a company tends to be most underestimated? Can you explain or give an example?

People are always the most underestimated aspect of running a business. People are your biggest asset and your biggest challenge. Everyone has their own dreams and trials in their personal lives, and that’s inevitably going to affect your business. That’s OK. Sometimes people need to quit, or they just can’t do what you need them to do. Lives are messy, and business doesn’t like messy, so you need to learn to anticipate and accommodate that messiness in your business model.

Here is the main question of our interview. What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Began Leading My Company”?

1. I wish I had known just how much work it would be! I think people often underestimate what it takes to start a business. When I reflect on those early years, I can’t imagine finding the energy to do it again. Then again, maybe it’s better I didn’t know that. Naivety can be a big asset in that respect.
2. I wish I had known just how rare integrity is. For employers in almost every industry, finding people who can commit to showing up and doing good work is difficult. When I was younger, I assumed that was much more common than it is.
3. I wish I had worked with more experienced people in my industry. Now that I’m older, I realize there is a real desire among industry veterans to share their knowledge and team up with younger people. I wish I had tapped into that wisdom and support available to me.
4. I wish I had known that not every challenge is a doomsday scenario. When I was younger, I would get so scared of people quitting on me or a job going south. I always thought, “this will be the end. This will sink my business.” Even a bad review would send me spiraling. Years later, I realize that these things are part of running any business, and you just need to keep pushing forward.
5. Probably the most important thing I’ve learned over the years, and the thing that everyone should learn as early as possible is that you have to be intentional about spending time with your family. If you don’t make a point of being present and holding that part of your life as sacred, it will fly by, and you can never get it back.

You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most good to the most people, what would that be?

I would encourage people to think of their businesses as opportunities to uplift their communities. I’m a Christian, and my business is just a flooring company — it’s not a Christian organization — but I see the business as a way to live up to my values of supporting my neighbors and lending a hand to those in need. A business should be about more than just making money for its stakeholders; it should play a positive role in its community.

How can our readers further follow you online?

I don’t have a strong social media presence, but our communications director is working on that! In the meantime, the best way to see what we are up to is by visiting our website, footprintsfloors.com.

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for the time you spent with this!