Franchise Friday – Ep217 with Albert Hermans of Floor Coverings International

For this episode of Franchise Friday Melissa interviews (live, and in-person) Albert Hermans of Floor Coverings International

Albert Hermans has been a member of the Floor Coverings International team since 2015. Albert served on our Operations Team for years until 2020 when he began working with our Franchise Development Team. Having worked in Operations with our most experienced franchisees, he brings practical field experience as he coaches prospective franchisees toward business ownership. For his entire career, Albert has owned small businesses and has worked with small business owners. He and his family have been able to personally experience the benefits of small business ownership and having the ability to control your own destiny. His first foray into entrepreneurship started at 18 when he launched an online e-commerce business. After exiting that business, Albert then started a second small business at age 22. That second small business began as an individual location and then grew into a 60+ location franchise company. Since then, Albert has been involved with many other small business ventures. Albert is passionate about entrepreneurship and how it can help individuals create a lifestyle of freedom and wealth. He is a graduate of Rutgers University. Albert lives with his wife, Teressa, two daughters, Emory & Lainey, & dog, Nacho, in Monmouth County, New Jersey.

• About Floor Coverings International®
  Floor Coverings International® is here to provide you with the best in-home flooring experience. Our Design Associates and our flooring team are both dedicated to superior craftsmanship because we want the floors in your home to be functional and beautiful. You can always count on Floor Coverings International® for quality products and workmanship that is second to none. See how we can help with your floors.
• Expert Design Associates
  One of the things that make us stick out at Floor Coverings International® is we truly take pride in the work we do for you. From the moment our Design Associates walk through your door, they build the kind of trust that makes your project all that more valuable. We respect your time, your home and everything else.

Floor Coverings International Flooring franchise disrupts the flooring industry by revolutionizing how homeowners buy new floors.

Floor Coverings International flooring franchise disrupts the $48 billion residential flooring* industry for good.

While the rest of the industry still makes consumers leave their homes to visit a big box store to make a personal and important decision for their homes, Floor Coverings International brings the flooring store directly to our customers’ kitchen tables. Our revolutionary model of ease and convenience has been rewarded with the highest NET Promoter Score in our industry. In today’s world, where homeowners are focused on safety and convenience for their home improvement projects, Floor Coverings International stands out as a brand that has brought a new way of servicing customers to the flooring industry.

As a franchise opportunity, Floor Coverings International also stands out. Ours is a business built on relationships to provide our customers with the very best in-home flooring experience in North America! Our proven business model has also helped hundreds of entrepreneurs thrive – in a business that is simple to run and easy to scale. Our large, protected territories cover an area with over $40 million worth of residential flooring opportunities, and our exceptional training and ongoing support help franchisees capitalize on this $40 million opportunity in their markets. With over 200 locations in the United States and Canada, Floor Coverings International is ready to rapidly expand across the country. Our commitment to giving back extends beyond the four walls of our customers’ homes and into the communities in which our customers live, work and play.

Mellisa notes that entrepreneurship and franchising are key.

“All right, people, that’s all you need to know. But I do think it’s really interesting that you kind of fell into the startup entrepreneur space and then found franchising. What I love about franchising is you can take your experience with helping people give back, which is part of your former life and then you weave that into franchising. Now you’re not in fitness at all, your in-home services, but you’re still taking the pieces you’re your prior life, knowledge skills, all those things and putting it into practice, in a completely different industry. What was it about franchising? What was it about your prior experience being a small business owner? You built something that became a franchise. And then you found Floor Coverings International. What was it about franchising that sparked your interest?”

Albert agrees,

“my experience with the fitness brand I started was about helping people change their lives through fitness, nutrition, and motivation. And it was all about giving a great experience to the client. And helping them change the way they looked and felt about themselves. We chose to scale it from reading textbooks, attending online webinars, and whatever about franchising. And then immediately, once we started learning about what it would take to be a good franchisor and there were so many parallels to coaching and fitness and caring about somebody’s goals and what makes somebody a good fit for your program versus not kind of a similar to a good franchisee in a franchise organization. What led me to Floor Coverings International is identical to what I think a client of a franchise development person would go through to consider leaving their job or leaving something they found security in, or maybe not looking for a business that they can own because they want to follow systems that had been laid out before them. So even though I started a couple of businesses, I was looking to join an organization where I could learn and follow in the footsteps of people who have done that before. And I mean, indeed, Floor Coverings is part of a publicly traded organization with the same people that built brands that we all know as consumers like California Closets and CertaPro painters, Paul Davis restoration. And so that’s why I chose to come here, and I can still work with my passion for helping people get into business. We are looking for people not with industry-specific experience but with leadership skills that are comfortable building a team of three to five employees minimally and then leading that team. And you may operate differently than I operated. And that’s okay. And because we all have different backgrounds, experiences and skill sets, that does allow you to have, even though it’s the same system in business, you and your own flavor.”

More About our Host, Melissa Pang