The World Floor Covering Association (WFCA) recently announced an initiative to deal with and reduce the industry-wide installer shortage. The plan includes a major investment from the WFCA, invitations for other industry entities to get involved, a network of recruiting and training as well as dramatic changes in the very framework of the association. We had an opportunity to sit down with Scott Humphrey, CEO of the WFCA, to get an inside look at this initiative. The following are excerpts from that conversation, which you can watch in the Videos section of our website.
TF: The industry has been wrestling with the installer shortage for years. Earlier, the WFCA announced the launching of an initiative entitled “We are Part of the Solution.” To launch this initiative, the WFCA took a dramatic step demonstrating its degree of seriousness for this effort. This step came in the form of a dollar-and-cents commitment to the effort committing $1 million in seed money, demonstrating that it indeed is part of the solution. Talk about this commitment and how it came to pass.