Urbana, MD, July 24, 2006--The owners of one of the oldest flooring companies in Montgomery County are opening a branch in Urbana this fall.
"The new branch of King Floor Service will be a showroom with samples," owner John McGee said Friday.
McGee and neighbor Mark Schaefer, both of Woodsboro, bought King Floor just two years ago. McGee, who will run the day-to-day business, said he's savvy from a lifetime of hard labor that includes flying helicopters, working construction and selling candy.
He's not bashful about haggling with Baltimore-area distributors over prices, he said, drawing confidence from his previous career as a superintendent of construction sites, including the Washington Convention Center.
His grandmother taught him everything he needs to know about retail, Mr. McGee said. She put him to work in a hardware store on the northern tip of Long Island when he was 13.
"My grandfather had died," Mr. McGee said. "My grandmother owned the store with another family and they wanted more representation from her family."
At first, the manager wasn't pleased with the teenage replacement, he said.
"He gave me every dirty job in hopes that I'd quit," McGee said, recalling the poisons he cleaned off the racks. "The day went faster when I did something. That's how I looked at it."
McGee worked at the hardware store in the summers until he enrolled at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. By then his relationship with the manager had greatly improved, he said, and the manager attended his graduation in 1982.
"My work ethic won him over," McGee said.
He plans to do the same in Urbana with the floor service business, which will open in Charlie Seymour's 23,000 square-foot plaza by late September or early October as one of about 20 stores. The plaza is at the intersection of Md. 355 and Md. 80.
An insurance and investment company has already signed on to open in the plaza, and Seymour is negotiating with other companies.
King Floor will sell carpets, vinyl, hardwood floor and laminates with tactics McGee said his grandmother would approve of.
"If you buy materials from me and you want to install it yourself, I have the tools sitting in my store and I'll lend them to you," he said.
Lend, not lease, he said; the tools would be free to use. McGee believes in looking at the big picture--he said a lot of customers know how to do the work themselves but don't have the tools.
McGee was anxious to get back into retail, he said. He turned down the chance to buy his grandmother's hardware store in the early '90s because he was busy flying helicopters. He regrets the decision.
The Army sent him to flight school, then to Nuremberg, Germany, on a service mission to patrol part of a 690-mile border between Germany and what is now the Czech Republic.
He was also working on a $64 million renovation on an airfield near Nuremberg, he said. His mission was nearly impossible: build the site while patrolling the border.
Compared to that, his venture into the floor service business is a minor risk, he said. His biggest challenge is to keep King Floor Service the way it's been since it was first established in Damascus in 1937.
