10 QUESTIONS WITH...
Each issue, we ask a flooring industry professional 10 Questions. This month, we chatted to Gene Little, national sales manager at Lifestyle Floors.
business and given the opportunity to work for Lifestyle Floors.
Q4
If you could hire any one person to be part of your
team, who would it be and why? I like the idea of having a monthly rolling consultancy populated by a consumer who has recently purchased flooring; their personal insight into the process would be invaluable to our business.
Q5 Q1
What was your first job? My first ‘proper’ job was
working in the warehouse of a flooring retailer man-handling hundreds of bags of still warm underlay and rolling carpet onto the racking.
I was there for over five years in total, working my way up into sales on the shop floor, then spending 18 months as a senior estimator. It gave me a good foundation in the industry that I use to this day, and an appreciation of the workload our retailers face on a daily basis.
Q2 Q3
How did you get into the industry?
After I finished at technical college, along with my peers, I applied to hundreds of jobs in the classifieds, including the flooring warehouse mentioned above.
I got a call to start the next day, and have been in the industry since.
What has been your proudest moment?
Speaking professionally, it was being trusted by the senior managers in the
40 | 10 QUESTIONS
What’s the best advice you could give to
someone new coming into the industry? No matter what you’re trying to achieve, or the question being asked, keep asking yourself why? Never stop learning or questioning, it can only improve both your professional self and the business you are working for.
term career prospects which isn't reliant upon formal education qualifications; this adds a real richness to the different people we meet on a daily basis.
Negative: the minimal value placed on sampling (which isn’t good for the environment) and the sparsity of easily accessible industry-specific training on product, sales and marketing.
Q8
What do you think the future holds for
flooring design? I believe there will soon be a serious and co-ordinated approach to our environmental issues, including dedicated third-party assistance in areas such as recycling, to ensure our product life cycles have minimal environmental impact.
Q9 Paul Atreides from Dune Q6 Q7
If you could be any character from film or
TV who would you be? A chance to channel my inner geek! I’d be Paul Atreides from Dune, Bladerunner Rick Deckard or, a character who SHOULD have appeared in film, Glorfindel from Lord of the Rings.
What do you think are the positive and negative
aspects of the flooring trade? Positive: the trade offers the opportunity of diverse and long-
If you weren’t in flooring, what career
would you choose? I would love to be able to write full time; journalism had a lot of appeal when I was younger.
Q10
Duncan Owen, Divisional Manager
Oscrete Performance Additives asked: If you could work in any country in the world, where would it be and why? I’d have to say one of the Scandinavian countries. Their climates can be worse than ours yet not only can their product and design be more influential, three out of the top five environmentally- conscious countries are in this part of the world. It would be very good to see how they do it first-hand.
Check out next month’s issue to see what Gene asked our next industry professional…
www.lifestyle-floors.co.uk
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