Every two weeks, FCNews seeks out flooring retailers across the country to offer their advice on hot topics of the day. This week, we asked: What will be your area of emphasis in 2024?
Here are their responses:
The major areas of emphasis are to maintain the highest quality of customer service, top-notch quality installations and to keep our showroom updated with new and appealing products. We have also increased our advertising budget to let all the new people moving into the area know where to shop local and why we are the preferred choice over our competition and box stores.
—Don Cantor, Lake Interiors Chelan Chelan, Wash.
Financial performance will be our main focus in ’24 given the ever-increasing costs of doing business. Cost containment and margin integrity will be at the forefront of all we do.
—John Bretzloff, Barefoot Flooring Castle Hayne, N.C.
My focus is to get back to the basics, relationships and networking. It’s the law of reciprocation—I send people warm referrals to good service providers, and they send them back. It’s the most profitable thing I’ve done in my 31 years in flooring.
—Don Lovato, CarpetSource USA Albuquerque, N.M.
We cut our budget, radically reduced overhead and shored up our cash reserves to become as lean and mean as possible. Diversification may be critical. From low end to high end, commercial and residential, we are ready for whatever challenges 2024 brings.
—Rick Oderio, Conklin Bros. San Jose, Calif.
We are focusing on credit card processing fees in 2024 and seeing what we can do to mitigate them. These fees have become a large number and consumers happily enjoy the points the credit card companies are giving them. We will be focusing on lowering those fees this year.
—Chris Cosentino, Hadinger Flooring Naples, Fla.
