Building Success from the Ground Up: A Conversation with Mike Fleming
In this episode of The Paid Media Playbook, Laura and Lisa sit down with Mike Fleming, founder of Carpet Liquidators. Mike shares his journey from working in his father's flooring business to establishing a thriving company with seven stores. Discover the strategies that propelled his business, including the power of newspaper advertising and the challenges and rewards of expanding a local business.
Chapters:
00:00 - 05:20 - From Family Roots to Entrepreneurial Beginnings
- Mike Fleming discusses his early influences and how working in his father's flooring business set the stage for his entrepreneurial journey. Learn about his initial foray into the business world and the founding of Carpet Liquidators in Tacoma.
05:21 - 7:20 - The Power of Newspaper Advertising
- Dive into the advertising strategies that helped Carpet Liquidators explode onto the scene. Mike shares how traditional newspaper ads, particularly in the Seattle Times, played a crucial role in the company's growth and expansion to seven stores.
10:41 - 12:00 - Growth, Expansion, and Future Plans
- Mike reflects on the expansion of Carpet Liquidators from Tacoma to Seattle and beyond. He discusses the challenges of managing a growing business and shares insights into his future plans, emphasizing why seven stores are just the right number for him.
Links and Resources:
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- Lisa Wekellis on LinkedIn
- Laura Szczes on LinkedIn
- Double Z Media Website
- Double Z Media on LinkedIn
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Transcript
Lisa: Well we're talking today with Mike Fleming. Mike, thank you so much for taking some time to chat with us.
Lisa: You start by giving our listeners just a brief overview of your career?
and didn't know what to do. [:Laura: Didn't know that.
Mike: , once I started running little newsprint ads in Tacoma, It just totally exploded, and at that point, had to expand to Seattle, of course, and grew to two stores, and then, and then it was off to the races, and now we're up to seven stores.
Mike: And probably don't want any more, for sure.
Laura: What year was that, that you started the company?
Mike::Laura: and you just started doing most of the advertising on your own, right? Mike. And
a big proponent of newspaper [:Laura: of course, yeah,
Mike: his, his, his company, he ran just, that was it, pretty much newsprint in the Seattle Times back then they had a section called the What's Happening, which was I don't even know if they still have that section, but It was , kind of a tablet insert in the, in the, in the paper.
Mike: And then he could buy the back page of that. So he had the, so he had the back page and that came out on Fridays.
Laura: Yes. I remember that.
Mike: He probably did it every other week for the whole year. So that was his ad budget. So just in Tacoma to do it locally, it was easy using the Tacoma News Tribune.
Mike: Once I got to Seattle, I started doing the Seattle Times a little bit, but then soon expanded that to radio and TV.
mber that when I first moved [:Mike: Yes. J. P. Patches. And we had,
Laura: Awesome.
Mike: we had Bill Yan doing a lot of our voice work.
Mike: He's still out there. I heard him. Yeah, he does. He might do the door store because they've used him forever.
Laura: If anybody out there doesn't know who JP Patches is, I actually did not grow up here myself, but I, I know a lot of people who have and JP Patches had a show. And he would take people in different places in the Northwest and he had friends on the show too, but he was a clown.
Laura: Let's be clear. He was a clown. And awesome, but he was like such a Northwest, like staple, you know, so many people had grown up with him and, you know, he may be a good reason why. You are so well known now
so I hadn't. It's like, when [:Laura: let's put this clown on here.
Mike: Yeah, yeah, so we, we had JP kind of pushing the pallet jack and getting on the forklift. We had different things with him. Yeah. Yeah.
Mike: Yeah.
Laura: And, , we got to remember that this was the time in advertising when people were doing pretty, , crazy things like, you know, taking a hammer at a car dealer and we're smashing prices down and stuff like that,
Lisa: It sounds like you had great success with print. Are you still doing print ads?
ings. I mean, that's, that's [:Laura: I saw that.
Mike: Yeah, a little tad, tad amount just to
Laura: a presence. Yeah.
Mike: catch everybody because not everybody and not everybody's looking at certain things.
Laura: hmm.
Laura: We do that too. We kind of have a wide range of, you know,
Mike: Yeah, yeah,
Laura: do some Sunday times, do some, digital, do some paid. So, you know, do all kinds of things cause you want to be everywhere.
Mike: yeah, yeah, yeah,
Laura: What's the benefit of working with us and not doing it yourself? Like, why do you have media buyers?
love buying, that's part of [:Mike: My carpet situation is I love the buying part of it. Buying, buying truckload deals, negotiating, okay, I could take that to media and it would be a real shit show here with all the ad reps
Laura: Oh, oh yeah.
Mike: oh boy, it would be, I would need it, I would need probably another 10 hours a week just to deal with all those people.
Mike: So. So,
Laura: can't have 10 of you. Yeah. There can't be 10. Expert negotiators. Yeah.
inion on how to do it. , so, [:Lisa: But no one knows your business as well as you do either.
Laura: tell our clients,
Mike: Right, if I defer a little bit of it to you guys, it helps me out in the long run. Then I can just focus on my business. Right, the flooring business. Yes.
Laura: You are the marketing director as well as, , the owner and the CEO. Do you feel like I guess what's your biggest roadblock to hiring somebody in house that would coordinate things for you?
Mike: Well, I always get a little bit hung up with the creative side of it, because I have my own thoughts with that, and I don't like a lot of things that people come up with. And If I, if I hired somebody in house, I think I would probably not gain anything because I, I'm, I don't know if I trust anybody's opinion on, it.
s I would spend so much time [:Laura: that makes sense. I wondered that. I was, I
Mike: But never say never. Never say never. Now that, now that you're throwing these ideas in my head. Ha ha, no.
Laura: I mean, there's so much, there's just, you know, you guys do the you do the sales with the direct mail, for example. You do the you know, , these events , and so you have to actually coordinate all of that.
Mike: Yes. Yep.
Laura: Mike.
Mike: Yeah. Yeah.
Laura: Yeah, you got six, seven stores now.
else is there? Oh, , social [:Mike: Of course. Digital
Laura: Paid social, digital,
Mike: yes.
Laura: And, you know, paid search, which is, you know, end of the funnel, like, Great Place
Mike: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So one of my sons will have a marketing degree, so
Laura: That's awesome.
Mike: be coming in, so I don't know. We'll have to see.
Mike: Is flooring's boring? Ha, ha,
Laura: flooring's boring,
Mike: Yes, right. Ha, ha, ha.
Laura: So it'd be, I mean, you could change it to like Fleming and Sons.
Mike: Yeah, yeah, Fleming's son. Yes, there you go. Right, right.
Laura: You're like , the largest buyer of Mohawk, right. Or something like that.
hat is , that carpet is dead [:Mike: Thanks to, pushing ads and, spending the money.
Mike: I would say the hardest part for me in general is the creative side to it a lot of times, ad directors don't know flooring, right? They don't know what , to, , push a lot of times where I do, but then it's hard to kind of get that,, creative thing like, okay, I love that thing, and then sometimes I just hate everything.
Laura: I remember that, when we used to shoot, because we always wanted to, make it clear that we wanted it to be warm and fuzzy, but we also wanted people to know that we weren't this big overpriced, too expensive for everybody.
d it's in a big warehouse. , [:Laura: And so we had to do a lot of video for the of the warehouse. I was actually in one of those with my daughter. So yeah,
Mike: Yeah, we can see in a commercial one of you might pop up.
Lisa: We do have a final question. If you could go back in time and give yourself at the beginning of your career one piece of advice, what would it be?
Mike: Piece of advice. I would look back and I would say, keep hiring, keep hiring, keep hiring. Cause, smart people in my business I wish I had more of them.
Lisa: Yeah.
Mike: And I think the only way you find out how, people are is if they're working for you.
Mike: And I do have some fabulous people.
Lisa: But you gotta clone them now.
Lisa: All right. Well, thank you so
Lisa: much.
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