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Paul Boomer: Welcome back to Connect and Convert with Dennis Collins and Leah Bumphrey. I’m producer Paul Boomer. And last episode, we were speaking with Mark Flaman from the Flaman Group about their family business, about their family dynamics, and succession planning. This episode, we’re going to be continuing that with part two, where Mark is talking about the three pillars, hiring practices, and memorable marketing campaigns.

Dennis Collins: I have a question regarding kind of your three pillars. I studied your website and I saw three things that kind of impressed me. Customer responsibility, achieve goals, and make things better. Those are the three that I found on your website. Talk to us about each one of them. What do you all mean by customer responsibility? What’s your responsibility to the customer?

Mark Flaman: Ultimately, we work for the customer. So we feel like we’re liable and personally responsible, each one of us in the company, for the success of the customer. There are some times where there’s a little bit of friction between a salesperson or a sales manager and a customer…

Dennis Collins: Oh, that never happens.

Mark Flaman: And the customer is always right. But we really put a lot of emphasis on treating the customer, even if sometimes we don’t think that they’re right, that they are. Nothing comes to mind of a problem we’ve ever had with a customer issue that we haven’t been able to solve through some sort of agreement. Because we’re such a diverse business, obviously we have a lot to offer. So if it’s something where we’re butting heads on a piece of product, then we have other avenues that we can explore in terms of, okay, well, if that didn’t make sense, then maybe there’s some rental credits or… it’s even little stuff.

Like, when I was younger, we’d have bins show up and we get a call from a truck driver that they’re going to deliver an order of bins and they want to see if they can get it unloaded that night. Well, we’d stay at work, and we’d have a couple of pops and then the truck would roll into the yard. And pretty soon by the time it’s said and done, we’ve got everything packed away. We’re leaving the office at 9:30 PM. I mean, that happened countless occasions.

Dennis Collins: Yeah. So I saw too that everyone in the organization has a goal. Everyone has a mission. It sounds like. How does that work out?

Mark Flaman: It works out. Now, myself, I’m not really involved in too much of a team atmosphere right now with the new sprayer drone project that we’re bringing to market. But previously what we would do is we would make sure that we’re doing a SWOT analysis at the start of each year for each department and for each person. And really what it is, is it’s the executive level directors meeting with any person in the company to establish the goals that they want to achieve for the next year, and to work with them on coming up with a game plan to achieve those goals.

Dennis Collins: So it’s a formal process. This isn’t just, oh, hey, what do you want to get done next year? We do a little more than that.

Mark Flaman: For sure. And our HR team, they’re fantastic. I mean, it’s part of our employee reviews every year that there’s a pretty substantial form to fill out with, hey, what were you looking to achieve this year? What part about that did you not achieve? And they follow up really well. So they’ll get ahold of the right manager or the right person in that hierarchical chain to follow up with that employee to make sure that we’re doing all that we can to help them continue to try and meet those goals.

Dennis Collins: Hands on and accountability.

Mark Flaman: Yes, absolutely.

Dennis Collins: And the third pillar was making things better. I think you’ve already spoken at length about that. That’s about giving back.

Mark Flaman: 100%. It’s about giving back. One thing that popped into my head when you mentioned that there, Don Flaman, our president and CEO, I remember about 15 years ago, somebody had mentioned, I’m going to go outside and clean up garbage for a few minutes while I’m having coffee this morning. And I said, oh, that’s a bit of a weird thing to do. You work behind the parts counter or whatever. And they said, well, this morning, Don came into work and we watched him walk across the yard and he picked up five or six pieces of plastic or garbage on the way to the building, went out of his way to go around to the Laura’s container and drop them off.

And he wouldn’t have never done something like that for anything else than he just cares. And so when we talk about making things better, it’s every single facet. If there’s something out of place, it doesn’t take any more time just to readjust that one thing as you’re walking past it. Or there’s a shelf that needs to be wiped and maybe we have a slow Saturday. So the guys are keeping busy with that kind of thing.

So yeah, making things better on a whole is just exactly what it describes. But to get a little bit more granular, it’s making sure that we’re looking after the garbage in the yard, making sure that we’re looking after people who are not even within 4,000 miles of us to make sure that they have clean drinking water and eyesight and reading glasses and that sort of thing.

Dennis Collins: That’s amazing. I love the example. One quick point on that follow up. I love the fact that the top people, you said Don is the CEO, right?

Mark Flaman: Yeah.

Dennis Collins: That he does that thing. He models what he talks. He walks the talk. And a lot of times we find in a lot of family-owned businesses and others, there’s no walking the talk. There’s a lot of talk, but there’s no walk. And then they wonder why no one’s following.

Mark Flaman: There’s a lot of finger pointing, right?

Dennis Collins: Yeah.

Mark Flaman: There’s a lot of, hey, why didn’t you do that thing?

Dennis Collins: That’s your job. Yeah, that’s not my job. I’m the CEO.

Mark Flaman: Those words, they don’t exist in our company either.

Dennis Collins: Wow.

Leah Bumphrey: Not my job. The culture that you guys have inherited, you inherited it, but you kept it. And you guys have cherished this culture that Grandpa Frank gave you. Is show me, don’t tell me. It’s easy to say, oh, do this, do this, do this. But to quietly show, and when it’s from the very top, and that extends to all the executive, and then to all the people that you’re hiring, you either fit in or you don’t.

Mark Flaman: That’s pretty much it. And like I mentioned before, we do a pretty darn good job of vetting who belongs in the company and maybe somebody who isn’t a great fit, but it’s never like we’re discriminating against somebody. We are absolutely everybody. And we also… Everybody’s got the same opportunity to grow, both outside the company and within. But we always prefer to try and push people up from within the company before we start looking at outsourcing positions.

Leah Bumphrey: So how do you vet people when they’re coming in like when they are new to the company? What’s the vetting process?

Mark Flaman: That would be a pretty good question for the people who do the hiring. I’m not really involved in much of that at all. But we have a habit of finding great people coming from companies that I wouldn’t say aren’t doing so well. But let’s say if there’s a corporate buyout of a different brand of company or a different type of company. And maybe there’s a little bit of friction there. And then just throughout our network, and especially with whe western Canadian household name that is Flaman, we get resumes all the time. And my cousin Kurt, he does a lot of hiring.

One of his questions during the interviews is, what is your opinion on lawn gnomes, on garden gnomes? Or if you were a pizza topping, what would it be? One time we hired a guy because we asked him that similar, you know, if you were a pizza topping, what would you be? And the guy says, pineapple. Without even thinking about it, he says pineapple. Kurt says, why is that? He says, well, I don’t know. Half the people seem to love me. Half the people seem to hate me. But I work really well on most things. So that’s all I got for you. Okay, you got the job. We’re going to try you out. That was clever, right?

Leah Bumphrey: Well, that’s how you find out if they’re your brand of crazy or not, really.

Mark Flaman: That’s right. Yeah.

Leah Bumphrey: If it’s as much how do you react to something? Because the process of then being able to grow within the organization becomes obvious when they fit in. But it’s that initial getting into the bottom of the pile as you can use them to grow your business and grow themselves.

Mark Flaman: All the way. And I stress that a lot to folks as well in the sphere of business and when I’m talking about business with other business owners and with people who are prospective to opening their own business or wanting to elevate in some sort of way. I bring up the few examples in our company where, you know, okay, we hired somebody to sort bolts in the bolt container. We had a container full of bolts just for grain bins, and the bolts are different sizes and there’s nuts and washers and lock washers and stuff. But we would hire somebody just to sort bolts. And 20 years later, that person wound up being the CEO of our fitness division. And so we have stories like that that exist in our company on a number of different occasions.

Dennis Collins: Those are the best.

Leah Bumphrey: You talking about the fitness division reminds me of the story, and I love stories because I think stories, they just exemplify what you’re trying to say and what you are saying. But it was specific to the treadmills. And there was a treadmill that you had returned to you after like 100 years being out there, one of the originals. Tell Dennis and Paul this story. It’s great.

Mark Flaman: Yeah, so I don’t know exactly how true this is, but I’ve been told that grandpa was responsible for bringing like the first treadmills into North America. He had a knack for… He traveled to China. He’d go to everything under one roof type of a trade show. He’d find a cool product and try and bring it back. He was a little bit of a bull in a china shop that way. He was a little bit of a disruptor. And this will all tie into that story that you’re talking about. But first, I guess I would just mention how those treadmills got here.

So Frank comes back from China in, I think 1986 or 1987, somewhere around there. And he says to each of the three boys, to Rudy, Don, and Steve, “Okay, we’ve got four containers full of treadmills coming. Nobody knows what these things are, but we’re going to figure out how to market them. We’re going to figure out how to sell them. And the first person to sell their container full of treadmills, I’m going to buy them and their wife, brand new 1987 Ford quad cab three-quarter ton shop trucks.

So I’m going through a family photo album when I’m like 12 or 13 years old. And I see this picture of mom sitting in this truck and maybe I was in the truck too or something like that. But there’s a truck on the street and a truck in the driveway of our small house that we grew up in. And so there’s only parking for one truck in the driveway and like these two trucks, these are shop trucks. And dad says, yeah, well, here’s the story. So your mom drove one of these Ford three-quarter ton shop trucks around for a little while because I sold my container of treadmills first. Frank showed up with these two trucks. And so then with the returned treadmill, there was a gentleman named Brian Rask who is still with us. He’s been with our organization for about 35 years now. He wrote the original Flaman software program. So this customer shows up one day and they said, “Hey, we’d like to buy a new treadmill. And this one works totally fine, but we would like to upgrade with one with way more options.”

And so the salesperson or the fitness equipment salesperson at the Prince Albert store that my dad ran, he goes outside, looks in the back of the truck at this treadmill that they had brought to us to assess a trade-in value. And he said, “I have never seen anything like this before.” Of course, back then, a treadmill was only about four feet long and it had a lever that you would kind of pull to adjust the speed because it was a constant RPM motor and yada, yada, yada. So this thing is old, like it’s really old, like older than dirt.

And he says, “Yeah, I’m going to have to ask somebody else about this. I have no idea.” So he goes and gets data. And this is maybe about 15 or 16 years ago, dad comes out and he looks at this treadmill and says, “I will be darned. This looks like one of the very first treadmills we’d ever sold.” He got Brian to get a computer that we would have had or a computer that could run the version of software that we had back then. They cross-referenced the serial number and that was the first treadmill that Flaman Fitness had ever sold. So now it’s proudly on display at our PA store.

Dennis Collins: That’s a great story.

Leah Bumphrey: You guys gave that customer their pick of anything you had current on the showroom floor, right?

Mark Flaman: Yeah, I’m pretty sure that they did. And I think this ties right into the whole marketing thing, but I think about the way that the treadmills were marketed. And of course, we want to have that cool piece of history that anybody can walk in and go, holy smokes, what is this? Oh, that was the first treadmill. Oh, that is so fantastic. And we’ve been trying to collect a lot of the firsts. My long-term goal is to have a wall at some point, like 100 foot long wall. My cousin Mitch was talking about maybe doing a big deckled timeline along the wall with when each division started, when each of the stores opened, that sort of thing. And this would be an excellent candidate just to have on the wall. Hey, this is the first treadmill that was sold. But the marketing was crazy. Dad had sold a treadmill to somebody and that somebody had a dog and then this German shepherd learned how to run on this treadmill. So it was like around 1992 or 1993.

I remember being at home in the basement in Prince Albert watching cartoons or something and all of a sudden this ad comes on. And it was on a CTV channel, I’m pretty sure. And this ad shows Flaman fitness equipment, even your pets will love it. And then it shows this dog in an all-out sprint on a treadmill. And just some of the funny marketing stuff, we’ve always been pretty good at that too.

Dennis Collins: That’s what we kind of do, isn’t it, Leah?

Leah Bumphrey: Yeah.

Dennis Collins: I mean, if it looks and sounds like an ad, we don’t like it. We don’t use it. That didn’t look like an ad or sound like an ad. Your grandfather and your dad were way ahead of their times, for sure.

Mark Flaman: Yeah, there was a trickle-down effect, I think, between grandpa’s brain and dad’s brain for sure. Again, It’s hard for me personally to remember how the whole thing played out, but we were trying to figure out how to advertise water tanks more effectively at one point. So we sell water tanks all the way from 20 gallon small little potable water tanks up to 8,500 gallon fertilizer tanks, like any sort of a plastic tank, we sell it. So dad came up with this plan, we’re going to try and market tanks as if we’re in the military. And I’m gonna call this guy who is in from whatever community who’s got his blasting license, and we’re gonna blow up a water tank.

And I remember being very, very, very young and thinking, like, I don’t really understand how this stuff works, but it sounds pretty cool. And so as the ad played, and this was a television ad, dad’s dressed up like an army sergeant, and he says, “We are blowing tank prices out of the water. And then the shot would go to an F-18 or something or an F-16 that’s flying overhead, and it flies overhead, and it’s of course just b-roll from the military or whatever, and then it shows a couple of missiles dropping out and flying off, and then it’s a frame of a green 1,250-gallon round water tank in the middle of the field. We did this behind our…

Leah Bumphrey: I remember this ad.

Mark Flaman: Yeah, have you seen it?

Leah Bumphrey: I have seen this ad.

Dennis Collins: Tell me what happened.

Mark Flaman: So what they did was they filled the water… ‘Cause if you put dynamite into an empty tank, it’s just going to blow up and the tank will kind of flex and whatever. But if you have a substrate in the tank, like some sort of a liquid or a water or whatever. So they filled the water tank up with water and they dropped like, I want to say, like way more dynamite than what’s necessary. They probably dropped in like a couple sticks of dynamite. And so the frame goes from Steve dressed up like the sergeant to the plane, to the jet flying overhead, dropping the missiles. And then all of a sudden it’s this frame of just the tank out in the middle of the field and it explodes. And you can’t see anything ’cause it’s filled with water. So now it’s just a huge mist. And then there’s green pieces of plastic falling down into the field. And it was just, it was so out of control.

Leah Bumphrey: We’ve got to find that on YouTube. We got to find that out. That’s a classic.

Dennis Collins: What great stories. But there’s something, there’s a burning question, Mark, that you haven’t answered yet. And I hope… I’m going to have to ask it, I guess. Apparently, according to what I’ve discovered, you guys used to sell spy equipment. Are you allowed to tell us or would they come and arrest you if you told this story?

Mark Flaman: No, I don’t. Well, I don’t know. We shouldn’t politicize this podcast, but in today’s day and age, maybe I might be.

Dennis Collins: Yeah. Hard not to these days.

Mark Flaman: Yeah. So, I grew up at work with dad. Mom was going to school to learn how to do bookkeeping and stuff for the business. So I really I grew up at work with dad. And I remember running around one day trying to find my roller skates to go roller skating around the shop or whatever. And this truck shows up and we start unloading all these crates and we’re opening this stuff up in the showroom. And there’s bulletproof vests, night vision goggles. We had a microphone set up, kind of like what they use at the football game with the… It had like the dish on it and all that stuff so you could hear somebody talking.

Dennis Collins: Like this. Yeah.

Mark Flaman: Not only did we have one of those, we had one that you could hear people talking from inside of a vehicle with the windows shut, like really high tech stuff. So Steve starts putting… My dad, Steve. He starts putting ads out for this stuff like, “Hey, we’ve got this stuff and we’re trying to market just to see if anybody wants some of this stuff.” And then he starts getting phone calls from the RCMP.

Dennis Collins: I’d think so, yes.

Mark Flaman: Yeah. The officers showing up, they said, “What exactly are you doing here?” And he said, Well, I don’t know. I just thought this stuff was kind of cool, like night vision goggles. Who doesn’t want to set a night vision goggles? Dad would take us out into the field, me and a couple of buddies of mine late at night. And instead of spotlighting coyotes, we’re trying to find wildlife. And we’re creeping around in the dark with these night vision goggles on. And we just look like lunatics.

I mean, that part of the business was short lived. But what it expanded into is our surveillance and security division. So we had a division of our company that specialized in the installation and aftermarket care of security and surveillance systems. It was called Flaman security. And we had that going on in Prince Albert as well as Saskatoon.

Dennis Collins: That is incredible. Let me ask you this, Mark. Is there anything that you guys wouldn’t sell? If Frank could get a hold of it, you’d sell it. Right?

Mark Flaman: Now, this is the one line that I’m taking credit for. Sometimes, I’ll walk into a sales meeting or I’ll walk out of a sales meeting and the guys are fired up. And even I’ve told this to customers before, too. Welcome to Flaman sales, if we don’t have it, you don’t need it. And if somebody needs a building, we’re prepared to start selling our locations too. If somebody wants to buy a building, everything’s for sale. We’ll sell inside the building and then we’ll sell the building itself.

Dennis Collins: Wow. I have just totally enjoyed this. This has been a great. Thank you for being so transparent and so forthcoming with your great stories. I think that those are so informative to our listeners and our viewers. Don’t you think, Leah?

Leah Bumphrey: Absolutely. And you know what? Frank would be proud because you embrace this culture that he built. You and your cousins and your dad and your uncles, you guys saw something beautiful and you’re determined to keep it. And I mean, you talked about Jack, your two year old. Wow. His culture that he’s grown up in, it’ll be a little bit different. But what’s the important parts of it are there. And I know our listeners are going to just gain a ton from you taking the time to talk to us.

Mark Flaman: Fantastic. I sure appreciate the opportunity.

Dennis Collins: Our podcast is called Connect and Convert. I think that if you listened to Mark today, you probably found a bunch of ways to connect. And of course, take it from Frank and Steve and the gang. If you can figure out how to get it, they’ll figure out a way to sell it for sure. Great lessons. That’s all for today’s Connect and Convert. Leah and I will be back next week with another episode, Connect and convert.

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