A Short Chat with CITY Furniture CEO Andrew Koenig

By Rod Davis, CEO BBB serving Southeast Florida and the Caribbean

Rod Davis: Thank you for taking time to share information about CITY Furniture with the LGBT+ readers at OutClique. Like most family owned businesses, CITY Furniture has a unique story about its beginning and a major pivot it had to make early on to adapt to changing customer preferences. Can you share that background with us?

Andrew Koenig: Our business was started in 1971 by my father and uncle, a couple of hippies that wanted to open up a waterbed store. Business boomed through the ‘70’s and ‘80’s but the popularity of water beds declined and the business needed to pivot becoming a full line furniture retailer in 1994. My father is still involved with me in running CITY Furniture and our goal is to be the top home furnishings retailer in Florida.

Rod Davis: This past year, COVID impacted our entire community and many businesses have closed or faced severe cutbacks. How did you approach this situation, what changes did you make and what advice would you offer to other business leaders facing this and other similar challenges?

Andrew Koeing: In the early days of COVID (March/April) we quickly shifted resources to virtual sales, selling online, selling by chat and text messages to provide safe buying options to our customers and potential customers. Using technology to maintain sales proved helpful, but like many retailers, we were concerned about our ability to supply products our customers wanted to purchase. Fortunately, CITY Furniture has a diverse supply chain. We get about 10% of our product from our factory in Mississippi, another 30% domestically sourced and the remaining 60% comes from Canada, Mexico, Italy, China, Vietnam, India, and a large number of other countries. Our diverse supply chain with a significant presence here in the U.S. enabled us to avoid major slowdowns and keep a good supply of products for our customers.

In May and June, consumers started to feel better about their financial situation and more confident that we would overcome the challenges prevented by COVID and people began to invest in their homes. Swimming pool companies, remodelers, and furniture retailers started to see significant increases in demand. Fortunately, we were able to keep our supply chain moving. Because CITY Furniture had invested in technology and created a diverse supply chain, we had solid inventory levels and systems in place to pretty well manage the demand from consumers. Since the supply chains eventually started slowing a bit, we provided forecasting of products in need to help them best source customer needs and put in place processes to expedite products from suppliers to deal with the surging sales. We also trained our sales team to keep promises in check to create realistic expectations (i.e. under promise and over deliver).

Rod Davis: As a family-owned business, with local roots and employees, you are active in our community. Can you tell us about some of your initiatives and how you decide which programs to support?

Andrew Koeing: We have a pledge to give back a minimum of 5% of our profits annually. We pick causes to support that are personal and we believe in since that commitment to a cause is needed to make the biggest impact. I chaired the local American Heart Association Walk last year since my uncle and one of our founders died from heart disease. The event raised $1.5 million and we used unique incentives to like donating $25 for every customer who tried out a mattress in one of our stores. We have also been heavily involved in raising money for breast cancer support since my mother, like too many women, lost her battle against breast cancer. Since we are a local business, and a family-owned business, we believe it is important to support our community and do good for the community.

Rod Davis: In July of this year, we will once again recognize businesses at the BBB Torch Awards for building businesses with an ethical framework on the four C’s:

Character of Leadership: Setting forward a clear ethical mission for the business

Culture: Creating and maintaining a culture built around the mission of service to customers and community

Customers: Engaging customers in a truly collaborative relationship that builds trust with the business and the marketplace

Community: Being an active part of the community through programs, initiatives and employee outreach

My visit to your office convinced me that your leadership embodies these principles. You gather tons of data and information about your business. What are your secrets for using that information most effectively to keep CITY Furniture aligned with your mission, goals, key performance metrics, and maximizing each customer/community interaction?

Andrew Koeing: Our belief begins with culture and the leadership sets the example for the entire business to live that culture. We have a strong brand with a clear purpose, vision, mission, and values that we share with prospective hires, cover extensively in our training of staff and revisit and discuss every day with our team in our daily huddles. We talk about one value each morning in our daily huddle meetings and share examples of our associates living those values. You have to get the culture right, hire the right people, and the rest will take care of itself.

We work hard and have high expectations of our employees, but also encourage good work/life balance. It has been tough during the recent growth period when new people are being added in large numbers to keep the culture alive. This is especially challenging since much of our training is remote instead of face to face. But the authenticity of our human resource team helps overcome these challenges and the daily reminders and focus on our mission and values builds our culture into every new colleague.

Rod Davis: Thank you Andrew. Any last exciting new product, process, or initiative you would like to share with the readers?

Andrew Koeing: We recently added a new warehouse in Miami to increase our access to products so we can more quickly serve the needs of our customers and maintain a high inventory level. Our people are also the lifeblood of our business, but we have been heavily investing in new technology to help them better engage, track, and service our customers in each step of the customer journey with us at CITY Furniture. Feeling great, our customer experience is only getting better from here.