August 2004 - December 2005

My office in Colonial Heights was the conference room. I shared the space with the COO who was on the other side of the partition.

The Challenges

I accepted the Lumber Liquidators position in July of 2004. At 4:00am one Saturday morning, Kelsey, Sean and Debbie were sound asleep at our home in Arlington Heights when I slipped out of our house that hot August morning and I began the seventeen-hour southern drive to my new home and job in Virginia.
It’s great to work for a company that is solvent but we’re busting our butts to get ahead of the explosive growth. Lumber Liquidators had just purchased the recently vacated John Deere plant in Toano Virginia (outside Williamsburg) and we had to adapt it to our onslaught of orders for hardwood flooring.

During my first few months in Virginia I lived in motels while I looked for a place to live. Motel life can be unenjoyable so I spent all my spare time exploring the sights and history of Virginia.

Here is one of our new rolling billboardtruck trailers.

The COO of the company wanted me down there two weeks earlier than I arrived but I needed to take the family on a much-deserved vacation. There was a tremendous amount of work to get into the new building and I had a lot to do. Since Colonial Heights was 52 miles from the new plant in Toano there were a lot of people who didn’t think the drive was worth it including the members of my customer service department. Rebuilding the Customer service department for this relatively young company was a challenge while trying to coordinate the move of everything else to Toano.

My desk was made out of bamboo.  It was beautiful but it reeked of formaldehyde.

This is our new plant in Toano (west of Williamsburg).

This is my friend “Johnny Mop”.  He was called the mop because he had to mop up all the problems (CAO).

Rob and Randy in the Colonial Heights data center.

This is me and Bob Villa

We were invited down on the field for a Washington Redskins game. Our ad was flashing on the board behind us. That’s me and Tom Sullivan, owner and CEO of the company.

Here I am talking to Bryan Moreno (head of sales) at the 2005 Christmas party.

Tom spent a lot of money to get our name recognition.  It worked.

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