Q&A: Don Maier, Armstrong Flooring President and CEO

Armstrong Flooring recently announced that it will realign its business by uniting commercial and residential business operations. This realignment integrates the company’s residential and commercial sales, marketing and product management teams, and it also unites the resilient and wood manufacturing operations. Floor Trends spoke with Don Maier, Armstrong Flooring president and CEO, to learn more about the changes.

Maier: First of all, this is a change that we have been working with and discussing with our customers and distributors for about nine months. We were really looking to understand how we need to structure ourselves to better align ourselves and support both of those constituencies, our customers and distributors. As you are well aware, prior to this change, we had two kinds of independent business units in that they had dedicated manufacturing, dedicated engineering, dedicated marketing and product management teams, and as well, dedicated sales organizations out in the market. While this provides a level of focus, there are always advantages and pros and cons to any structure, it made a number of touchpoints unnecessary for our customers to deal with, and as you can imagine, we had motivated incentives for individuals to drive their segment of the business. Sometimes it created invisible walls that got in the way of us really giving the customer a channel they were looking for.