Have you ever sat on a chair and wished it was more comfortable? Comfortable furniture is really important because we spend lots of hours of our day in them. For Cliff Levin and his company, Furniture for Life, their mission is to make the world a more comfortable place through a variety of well-designed, well-made furniture products with health, wellness, and comfort-related twists on them. He guarantees that everything they do and touch is going to have an underlying health message, and that there’s real value to buying the luxury and high-quality brands that they make and represent. He says the passion and the way they care about their customers is core to their success.

Cliff Levin CEO Furniture For Life, transforming the business while delivering lasting profound health and comfort benefits

We have with us the Founder, CEO and President, Cliff Levin, of Furniture For Life.

Happy you joined us here, Bob.

Cliff, thanks so much for taking time with us. Tell us a little bit about your business and who you serve.

We’ve been in business eleven years. Our mission is to make the world a more comfortable place. We do that through a variety of well-designed, well-made furniture products. We talk to discerning consumers who care about the quality of product they buy and they’re interested in something that’s healthy and comfortable. That’s who we’re after.

When I first came in, there’s a showroom that we were in. There’s a quantity of high-tech furniture, you didn’t get to test drive one of these pieces of furniture and it looks like a very high-speed, sleek, easy chair, the one that I was in. At least that’s what I would call it.

All of our furniture has a twist on it that’s health, wellness, comfort-related. The core of our business is massage chairs, that’s how we grew up as an organization. We’ve branched out from massage chairs into the recliner that you were trying, which is a True Zero Gravity recliner under the Positive Posture brand name. We also carry a Norwegian brand of chairs where we’re the North American distributor that are healthier than your average office chair because they introduce a level of movement into your day that isn’t possible in a typical static office environment. Everything we do and everything we touch is going to have an underlying health message.

The health message is not you and I chatting about it. There’s research that’s been done that supports your assertions on what you’re talking about and being a healthy piece of equipment.

For example, this Norwegian brand I’m talking about, the brand is Varier, there is a Move stool. It encourages you to fidget. When we sent that Move stool to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and there’s a research lab there. There’s a guy named Dr. Levine who is deep into researching how to make Americans and people around the world more healthy in the context of this sedentary way of life that people in advanced economies live.

The Move stool is something called NEAT-certified. NEAT stands for Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis. It’s a very fancy way of saying how much are you moving and how much energy are you burning when you’re not exercising? It turns out, according to Dr. Levine’s research, that that kind of activity is as important, if not more important, than making a point of exercising 45 minutes a day, in terms of your long-term health and vitality.

I’m in the office environment and I’m sedentary through much of the day in front of computers and doing what I do. You think about the various things to sustain energy and stay competitive in the business environment and there were applications. Like the chair, when you move and fidget, I’m going, “That’s exactly what I’m doing right now is I’m moving and fidgeting, and I have an urge to twist back and forth.”

Perhaps not a good thing when there’s a video camera trained on you because it will drive people crazy, but that’s what it encourages you to do.

You were talking about your timing being so impeccable coming into this business.

In 2006 I had stopped what I was doing before, which was running a chain of back specialty retail shops on the East Coast primarily, the DC area. I moved here to Boulder and through a variety of lucky breaks I ended up jumping into the massage chair business. A business that I had understood and known from the health specialty store business, and it felt like a matter of months later that it was announced that the United States was in the deepest recession in modern memory, and there we were, brand new company. It was me and a couple of other folks, and that’s the moment when I thought, “My timing couldn’t have been any better.”

We were lucky, we got through it. We got through it because we were small. We got through it because we were starting and we were also talking to a slice of the American consumer that was relatively insulated from the worst parts of the recession. They were able to afford our, what turned out to be, luxury products. It took us six months to do our first million and that was before the deep recession. When the recession hit, we continued to grow through that, which isn’t a reflection on our capability or intelligence. It’s that we were coming off of a very small base and we happen to be starting right then.

Everything we do and everything we touch is going to have an underlying health message.

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For the folks out there going like, “Is your product in furniture? Is it for me?” who’s your typical client?

I’m going to split the group in two. Let me talk about massage chairs. Massage chairs are big, they’re bulky, they’re expensive and that’s a long way of saying it’s a big decision if you’re going to bring one into your home. We have affluent customers who are stressed out by their lives and are looking for a way to escape for 15 minutes or 30 minutes every day. For them it’s not so much the expenditure, but it’s the commitment of space, it’s the commitment of a decision to bring this object into their house. They bring it in to run away a little while from their busy lives. That’s one set of consumer. Well-to-do families, well-to-do husbands and wives who know that this moment away from it all is going to be beneficial to their mental health and well-being. That’s one side of it.

The other side of it is, “I’ve got serious chronic neck, back, or shoulder pain. I don’t care how much money I make, I’m going to solve this problem.” It’s interesting and heartwarming to me that we talk to a lot of people who are buying our products who are financially stretching to own our products because after they try them they believe in them. There’s where the real testimony lies in terms of what our product capabilities are. Somebody who’s may be a mechanic whose work is killing their bodies and choosing to step up and buy one of our chairs. Our most popular chair is $9,000, and saying, “This is what I need. I’ve tried them all, this is the best thing on the market.” Both of those groups are groups that we speak to. Both of those groups are important to our business.

When I was doing my test drive and you were saying, “Let me show you basically the Zero Gravity attitude of this particular chair,” and you were talking about the benefits to the customer of the Zero Gravity. Let’s touch on that for the folks who are going, “Maybe this is the solution for me.”

Let me organize our products into groups here, because this is going to get a little confusing. We have massage chairs and we represent multiple luxury brands of massage chairs. One of them is the DreamWave brand, that’s our high-end brand. One of them is the Panasonic brand of massage chairs, and everybody knows the Panasonic brand. We are the exclusive United States distributor for the Panasonic brand of massage chairs. There’s a third brand, which is a brand that we developed, called Positive Posture. We have massage chairs under all of those different brand labels and they’re slightly different flavors and they feel different and certain consumers will drift one way and others will drift another way, depending on their needs.

Under the Positive Posture brand, in addition to massage chairs, we also have True Zero Gravity recliners. The novel ability of True Zero Gravity recliner is that it can get your ankles and your calves well above the level of your heart. If you happen to be an old weekend warrior jock and you tweak your ankles regularly or you’re diabetic and you’re suffering from edema, swelling of the ankles or the calves, the ability to raise your ankle or calves above the level of your heart is tremendously therapeutic. It will reduce swelling in a matter of a few minutes. If you’ve ever had any kind of surgery, wherever it is on your body, the surgeon will tell you, “If you’re able to elevate that part of the body,” and that’s precisely what a Zero Gravity recliner is capable of doing with your calves and your ankles, in addition to the fact that it’s ridiculously comfortable. Most people buy these True Zero Gravity recliners from us because they find them comfortable. Some of the people buy them because they absolutely need the therapeutic benefits that the recliner offers.

When I was in the chair, but you were talking about it’s almost like a traction effect on the lower back. I don’t know what degree it was, but you literally could feel the pressure come off your lower back.

Precisely what the recliner is designed to do. What happens is the posture you’re in is a semi-fetal position. If you can imagine lying on your back, this is why we call it True Zero Gravity. Imagine an astronaut floating in space in a relaxed posture. You have that bend at the hips that you always see in an astronaut and I refer to it as the semi-fetal position. People with low back pain frequently can’t sleep on their backs at night, what they’ll do is they’ll turn on their sides, and then pull their knees up toward their chin a little bit, and that will instantaneously give them relief, and that’s what this recliner is able to do, while you’re lying on your back and sitting in it, put you in that semi-fetal position.

You started out and it was basically you and a couple of folks. We’re right adjacent to everybody. The place is awesome. The tables move up and down, pretty much everybody is in the same chair that I’m in. Many of them are standing up at their desks. For me I like to write on walls and there’s one wall that’s designed to be written on. How many folks do you have in your organization now?

We have 42 people on the payroll.

How you have the groups organized? Because you have a luxury premium product, you have a focus on a particular area or a couple of areas within your organization.

In order to share the message, we have a fairly robust marketing effort, that’s absolutely necessary. We want to rise about the clutter and we want to make the argument to consumers, in case any consumers are listening right now, that there’s real value to buying the luxury and high-quality brands that we represent. Part of that value then comes to another critical area of the company, which is the service side of the company. Once you buy one of our products, either directly from us or through one of our dealer partners around the country, at that point we’re engaged. That’s the first day of our engagement as far as we’re concerned.

From that point on you’ve joined the family, we are going to take care of you and your problems we see as opportunities to make you delightfully happy. I like to think that we do a good job in the way we answer the phone and the way we handle warranty issues and even post-warranty issues. We do it pretty well, it is certainly something we’re passionate about and care deeply about, and I believe it’s core to our success.

For the organization in where you’re going with it, what do you see as the key things that are coming in the next two to three years for the company?

We’re getting more complex. We’re adding products, we’re constantly upgrading our technical capabilities, and we’re taking on more challenges as they relate to designing products. I see our ability to weather the increasing complexity and dumb it down to the extent that we can by ignoring the things that don’t matter to the business and really focusing on the things that we do, and that’s much harder. It’s easy to say and hard to do. The complexity can bury us, and if we don’t keep up with our personnel systems and our technology systems, it will put a hurt on us. We’re doing okay, we’re trying different things and we’re taking a very different approach to how we organize the company in an effort to address this wave of change and complexity that we see coming to us.

This is heading toward probably my favorite part of the podcast, is where I get to quiz you to death, which is fun for me because I’d love to hear your answers. One of the things that I talk to business owners is their recent reading. What’s the most recent book or most influential book that has altered your perception on being a CEO or how you run your business and why?

Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business

Have you heard about this book called Traction?

I haven’t.

There’s this guy named Gino Wickman and there’s only one possible answer to this question right now because our whole organization is now built on the concept of putting in place an Entrepreneurial Operating System. Once all the pieces of that are in place, this guy, Gino Wickman, informs us that at that point you have something that he calls traction. You’ve got grip, you’ve got movement, you’ve got momentum, and you’re going in a direction. Traction involves a fairly painful process of trying to understand who you are as an organization. It’s only recently that we’ve gotten to 42 people. For a long time, the company could exist on people knocking on my door and going, “Cliff, what do you think of this? Cliff, what do you think of that?” It worked. It no longer works at 42 people.

We think hard about precisely who we are, how we’re going to focus, what our core values are. From there we develop a one-year plan, a three-year plan, and a five-year plan. After we’ve got those big blocks in place, and it sounds simple, it’s difficult to execute. It’s a big change for me and it’s a big change for a lot of people in the organization who are used to a much more informal environment. After you’ve broken it down like that, you then take your year and you chunk it out into quarters. There are all kinds of rules and commandments that we’re going to live by under this Entrepreneurial Operating System that ensure that we’re all pulling in one direction.

The most compelling aspect of it for me was the notion this guy, Gino Wickman says, “If you ask any successful business executive,” and we have a few business executives in here, “do you have a clear idea of where you’re going?” Anybody worth their salt will have something to say that’s pretty clear and pretty good that sounds a lot like a mission or a vision statement. Gino says the problem is not that good thinking people don’t have a clear idea of what they should be doing; it’s that they don’t agree. It’s that one executive and one executive has got one idea and another one has got another idea. It starts with people sitting in a room hour after hour whittling this thing down. I chime in every once in a while but the effort to get on paper clearly who we are, is a group effort signed off by me. Once it’s there we go, “We all agree this is what we’re doing,” and that’s the magic, that’s when the magic starts to happen.

I think about the entrepreneurial spirit, and you go, “I got that in the sales department. I can see that.” How does that entrepreneurial spirit manifest itself in the service department?

It’s interesting because we have this debate all the time, how much energy does the service department put into revenue-generating activities versus pure customer-loving activities? We tip way over on the customer love side of things. We all accept, me, the CFO, everybody else in the organization, that that is a cost center, that is not a revenue-generating center. The entrepreneurial spirit for them is tied to key measurements related to things like how long was it after the first call? How many days did it take to solve the problem? A lot of calls we get are solved in two minutes because it’s teaching the user something, but for real service issues. Call came in. Was it two days? Was it a week? Was it two weeks? which is a disaster. That’s how we measure them, and their goal is to come up with creative methods and systems to make that process more painless for the consumer and more efficient for us.

Have you ever met the author of the book?

No, but I would like to. I would like to tell him two things. You’re making me work way too hard, and when it clicks, the light bulb goes on and it’s amazing.

How long ago did you do this?

We started in earnest five months ago and we are six or seven months away from going, “We got it.”

Seeing some good symptoms?

Yes and some pain. It’s a struggle for me to not screw it up because I’m used to a very different way of operating and that’s true for some other people too.

What was that moment like when you said, “We got to do something different?”

It wasn’t me. It was the people around me. I wasn’t the one that said, “We have something we need to fix.” It was people coming to me and saying, “Cliff, it’s not working,” and me finally going, “You’re right.”

Here you are, “This is not working,” and you now start down this journey of, “What am I going to do?” How did you run across this book?

I can’t take credit for that. There are a couple of other people who were at another company before they came here, happened to be the same company, and they had gone through this process, this precise Traction process. They had seen it transform the way another CEO behaved and the activity and...