Features

Mohawk focused on customer & employee experience

Tuesday, March 2, 2021

Paul De Cock

Guiding Principles
Mohawk keeps focus on customer & employee experience

[Calhoun, Ga.] With a goal to be the best company to both work with, and work for, Mohawk is using what it calls “the three Rs” to guide it — Relentless customer focus; Ruthless simplification; and Reinvestment in talent.

“When we take care of our customers, we take care of our company. It is as simple as that. It’s rule number one,” Mohawk NA president Paul De Cock shared with FCW in an exclusive interview. “Our goal is to be the Gold Standard for our customers in product, in service, in quality, in customer service, in innovation and in execution. So everything we do in the company is focused on working on better innovation, better execution, better quality, better service and offering a better general value to our customers and to our end consumers.”

Relentless Customer Focus
Indeed, getting Mohawk products in front of the consumer starts with serving its retail partners. “When people are looking at flooring, they need to think Mohawk and what we have to offer. And, we need to be their first choice. So once we grab their attention, we want to convert them to a customer of ours,” De Cock explained. “We focus on making that more seamless, with better product and better strategies that create better value not only for the B-to-B customer but also for the B-to-C customer, the end user of the product.”

The company’s leadership sees company culture as the other component, making sure everybody in the company understands where Mohawk is going. “There is no effort too big to make sure we deliver on that promise,” he said.

Retailers were able to see this focus in action at the different Mohawk Momentum Roadshows being held across the country this year. “We are launching more product than we have ever launched; better product than we have ever launched; and, servicing our customers under very difficult conditions right now,” he asserted. “We are not shutting down our plants and, COVID or no COVID, we are coming to see you and creating an opportunity for you to see us at the Roadshows. And we did that in a very safe and responsible way.”

When the pandemic hit and businesses turned to operating remotely, Mohawk continued to work on campus to ensure servicing its customers. “Customers don’t understand what hoops we had to jump through to get product out the door with COVID’s impact and restrictions. The Mohawk team really stepped it up at all levels to make sure we were there to continue to service the business.”

Ruthless Simplification
One thing that was notable at the Roadshows was the intentional product launches. Each launch had a distinct story and reason for being.

“The floor covering market is complicated, choices are complicated, the landscape is complicated. But you only shop for flooring once every seven years. Our launches are purposeful. We make things simple — not simplistic but simple. We explain things in an easy-to-understand way,” he said.

The company put effort behind each launch having a different positioning and a different appeal to a certain customer and, most importantly, taking the clutter out of shopping for flooring products. “What we bring to market is extremely sophisticated from an innovation point of view. We don’t take the easy route so we balance the extreme sophistication but make it simple to transact with us,” he offered. “It’s difficult to continuously execute on that promise but we do.”

Reinvestment in Talent
Investing in its employees gives the company the foundation it needs to deliver on innovation, service, execution, value and more. That’s something, said De Cock, the company delivers on throughout the organization from the manufacturing floor to sales to marketing communications.

“We want to create a culture of winning and celebrating those wins. And we want to have an engaging atmosphere at Mohawk,” he said, adding that the company conducted internal research to identify what made talent happy and thriving and those findings helped launch its “More With Mohawk” employee brand campaign.

“The campaign is to position us in the labor market as one of best employers in the country and in the region. If you want to work in a sophisticated environment and build a career, this is a place you need to consider,” De Cock asserted “The campaign was really made by our people and what they said makes Mohawk special.”

But he said, what “more” means is different for different associates. “People can fill it in. What sets us apart is that there are no limits. We have this continuous push to do better and to be relentlessly executing on our strategies for the customer. And, ‘more’ is always possible. You have a great idea? We know how to deploy it. We have the capital and money to make it happen for you. We are a big company so we have a lot of ‘mores’ — more opportunity, more possibility, more capital, more realization of your dream.”

And the right people are able to bring an honest and humble approach, even when it is difficult, he added. “We need to be honest with our customers. These are very difficult times because we have dramatically escalating raw material costs so we have to tell our customers that we need to increase pricing because of dramatic inflation. But you have to do that in an honest, humble way — human way of bringing a tough message and working together to do what we need to.”

“We are extremely hard core in executing what we think is best for our customer — we push the boundaries of what is possible and work very hard to get it done. But we have an honest, humble and approachable style of doing that.” — Paul De Cock, Mohawk

Driving Forces
Helping to drive the three Rs are three new business presidents, all recent additions to the Mohawk team: Curt Hutchins, president, residential carpet; Kurt Weaver, president, resilient; and, Jamie Chilcoff, president, wood and laminate.

Hutchins, who joined Mohawk as president of residential carpet in March 2020, leads all aspects of residential carpet manufacturing and product development. His experience spans three decades and several manufacturing industries. Early in his career, he held roles in project engineering, R&D, and operations management at an aerospace manufacturer and a consumer products company. More recently, he was president of four business units with Eaton Corporation where he simplified product portfolios, drove operational strategies, delivered growth, improved profitability and built high-performing teams.

Weaver joined Mohawk in September 2020 and currently leads our growing resilient business. Kurt began his career as an engineer and spent several years in sales before moving into a series of leadership roles with Toyoda Gosei, an automotive parts manufacturer. He spent a decade overseeing product development, operations, planning and administrative functions and most recently served as president of their automotive plastic injection mold manufacturing, assembly and painting business for the last six years.

Chilcoff joined Mohawk in January 2020 as president of wood and laminate. He began his career in the flooring industry in marketing, and has since held sales, operations, and executive roles with James Hardie Building Products, Rain Bird and Gibraltar Industries. Most recently, Jamie served as president and CEO of Parex USA, a global leader in specialty chemical manufacturing. In this role, he executed several acquisitions, drove process and cost improvements and expanded operations to deliver growth at double the rate of the market over five years.