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Bringing Together Local Businesses and Neighbors of SWFL
Good Neighbor Podcast Estero
EP# 181 - Conley Black’s Secret to a Harmonious Life: Family, Business, and Organization
Ever wondered how transforming your closet could change your daily life? Join us as we chat with Conley Black from Florida Closets and More, an organization specialist whose journey took him from the corporate world of home building to the fulfilling realm of closet customization. Conley shares his story of prioritizing family after his son's illness, and how that pivotal moment shaped his business philosophy. From traditional closets that fell short of his needs to creating stress-reducing, functional spaces, Conley's passion for simplicity and quality shines through. He also opens up about the importance of in-house installers, ensuring top-notch security and craftsmanship for every project.
In addition to his entrepreneurial ventures, Conley juggles family life with four kids and manages five small businesses, all while flipping houses for fun and profit. He lets us in on his secret to maintaining balance and joy in a busy life. Conley’s commitment to exceptional customer service is evident through stories like handling a minor flood in a client's home, demonstrating that going above and beyond is part of their ethos. Tune in to get valuable advice on affordable closet systems and learn how investing in them can significantly enhance your daily routine. Plus, discover how you can benefit from a free design consultation from Florida Closets and More, making your home organization dreams a reality.
Florida Closets and More
Conley Black
(239) 284-2382
info@floridaclosetsandmore.com
WEBSITE
This is the Good Neighbor Podcast, the place where local businesses and neighbors come together. Here's your host, cabo, jim Schaller.
Speaker 2:Welcome Good Neighbors to episode number 181 of the Good Neighbor Podcast, estero. Today we have Good Neighbor Conley Black from Florida Closets and More Welcome. Hi thanks, jim. Hey, pleasure to get to know people in the community and what they do and share it with our listeners. So let's jump right in and watch you share a little bit about what you do over at Florida Closets and more.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so we're your standard kind of organization specialists. We always tell people we can save you a few minutes a day, can save you a few minutes a day. We take those. You know, a big portion of our work is new construction homes, taking those wire shelves out after closing and putting some adjustable shelves in and they can be very fancy. We've done closets where they played music when you open the door and we've also done them where we weren't in the building for an hour. You know, they were very simple, very fast, and we don't have a preference, we just want to. We want to kind of remove stress from your life and, like I said, save you a few minutes every day.
Speaker 2:Right, help organize people and get them in the right direction there. So how did you get involved in the closet industry per se?
Speaker 3:I, I, I'm your standard corporate washout. I was in a corporate home building for years and years. I ran large home building operations and a few years ago I just got sick of working for other people. I tell people I'm a walking talking cliche. So I was 34, with 54 employees or something crazy, and I just wanted to spend time with my wife and kids, and so I kind of quit slash, retired and, uh, I was living in a rental home at the time and my wife and I have moved a lot.
Speaker 3:We built a lot of houses over the years because of what I did for work and, and I was in this rental home and I was complaining that the closets were terrible. It's like I can't, I, I can't live like this, because we had always had closet systems in our houses. Now it's a's a first-world problem, for sure, but once you have a system like ours, you just can't go back. And so I'm in this rental home for a month and I'm just losing my mind. And my wife said well, you know, you've been looking for something else to do. I don't want you sitting around for a couple years doing nothing, you know, having a cigar in the pool. And she said why don't you just do that? You know you can kind of piddle and do you know? Work a few minutes a day, a few hours a day? Whatever you know, do something. And cause I didn't really know what I wanted to do. My midlife crisis was in the early stages.
Speaker 3:And so anyways, yeah, so we started a company just for kind of giggles. I sold closets a couple days a week, I installed closets a couple days a week and then six months later we had a salesperson, a full-time installer. Now we have multiple of each and we service, you know, Marco Island to Venice, Sarasota, if you're nice. We try not to go and just get, we don't mind it, it's just, it's just a long drive. I mean just logistically. You, you really do turn into one of those guys who's like hey, if we go 20 more miles we don't make any money. And I tell people, everyone knows for me, and money is not the most important thing, it's not the driver of my decisions, but we do have people we have to feed.
Speaker 3:So because one of our differences in one of us. One of our differences is compared to our competition, is we have full-time installers that only work for us. We don't use any subcontractor crews. You know, closets are very intimate. It's where people keep their guns, drugs and money and, uh, their jewelry and all those things. And so, uh, we tell people, uh, our people work for us, only us have full background checks, you know, driving records, that sort of thing. Um, but yeah, that's uh, and, like I said earlier, we have a. We have a few other businesses as well, so I'm I'm one of those like serial entrepreneur guys that's.
Speaker 2:That's a good thing, though you gotta, you gotta, keep growing constantly yeah so being involved in all of this? Um, we've all had some type of challenge or obstacle on our journey that maybe we can look back at. That's helped define who we are today. Is there something that happened along your journey?
Speaker 3:Yeah, the story I always tell and if you know me well at all, you know the story In late 2019 and early 2020, my long story short. I have four children now, but one of them he was four years old at the time got very sick and, um, as he was in the hospital, I had to be with him for 31 days, or whatever it was, cause my wife was breastfeeding our youngest at the time and so, um, going from you know, working in this big corporate uh situation, I had lots of authority and lots of responsibility and all of a sudden, I couldn't leave the hospital. You know, I had to. I disappeared for a month and, uh, again, I'm a, I'm a cliche in five or 10 different ways, but I came out of the hospital kind of like yeah, don't bother me, after five, I just want to spend time with my wife and kids.
Speaker 3:Um, and that's generally how I try to structure things. Now, uh, you know, we live in Babcock Ranch and we walk the kids to school, we walk them home from school, we ride scooters to school, things like that, and it's a very convenient way of living and that's one of the reasons we live up here is because we can have that extra time with the kids.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. And the older you get, the more you appreciate and want to spend time with the family and have them around.
Speaker 3:You realize what important yeah, I get more sentimental every 10 minutes.
Speaker 2:It's honestly, it's uh, it's frustrating, so so are there any myths or maybe misconceptions surrounding, uh, the closet industry that we could clear up for our listeners?
Speaker 3:um, yeah, I, I think the big one is um it it has a. A lot of people think it's dominated by the big corporates, the big franchises, and it's not. There's some really good businesses that are the medium small businesses that do. I mean we can do exactly what California closets are called by design. Does we do exactly what they do? We use the same materials. The only difference, again, is we use full time, you know, salaried installers, and so I think a lot of people think that and I've heard people refer to their closet, they call me and they say I want a California closet. It's like a proper noun, and so I think that a lot of folks think that those big companies are the only option.
Speaker 3:Like I said, we do exactly what they do. We do the same materials, we just do it in a different way. We believe Now, obviously, they do a great job as well and there's plenty of room for everybody. It's a huge market, but, uh, but I think that's the biggest misconception that I've we've bumped into and because of our name, people think that we're just another big company. But we have, I mean we have five employees total. Nice.
Speaker 2:So do you notice anything trending in the industry lately?
Speaker 3:Um, yes, but we don't participate. There's a lot of fun, trendy, different accessories and things like that, but for me I come from the production, home building world, I come from we do a certain you know, chick-fil-a, they do a certain thing well, and if you ask for a cheeseburger, they'll just tell you we don't do that here. And so, uh, there's lots of fun, cool trends, especially, you know, with, uh, social media and ease of information, like everybody has right now. You can, I'm always getting, um, you know, notifications or things sent to me, or or I sometimes I'll just kind of search around and look at closet trends. So there's lots of cool accessories, but the problem is those are they all cost money because they're new and they're they're detailed or whatever.
Speaker 3:And for us, like I said earlier, our goal was to to relieve your stress. Our goal was to save you a few minutes a day, um, because your, your closet is now organized, or your drawers they're not in your bedroom Now, they're in your closet. You know what I mean. And so we don't focus on all those things. We do a certain thing really well. We try to keep it simple. Now, again, we do lighting jobs and things like that. We can. We are capable of doing very complicated, fancy things, but we present ourselves and we market ourselves to the kind of the middle market where folks just they just want it to be reasonable, they want it to be comfortable, they want it to be easy and they don't want the price to be crazy. So I think, to answer your question succinctly which I don't ever do the trend is making things complicated and we're trying to avoid that Absolutely.
Speaker 2:So are you from Southwest Florida originally.
Speaker 3:Does it sound like I am? Where does it sound like I'm from? Not here. This is an important question what do you think uh, does it sound like I? Where's it not here? What do you think where?
Speaker 2:does it sound like I'm from? Tell me a state.
Speaker 3:You sound like a midwesterner oh yeah, baby, uh, no, I'm from eastern kentucky uh really yes, sir, I spent in in college. I've spent a lot of time getting rid of my accent. I took a lot of public speaking classes, but uh, yeah, I yeah.
Speaker 1:I am a.
Speaker 3:I'm a born in the woods, uh raised in a cave, Eastern Kentucky, hillbilly.
Speaker 2:How did what brought you down here?
Speaker 3:I married a Fort Lauderdale girl, um, and then, a few years ago February of 2021, my wife walked in our house and she said we're moving to Florida. And we lived in Knoxville, tennessee, at the time, and and so, and. So she said she wanted to move to Florida, but because she grew up in Fort Lauderdale, she didn't want to live there. Orlando's traffic is crazy, and so we ended up with Tampa or Jacksonville, and then I was offered a job in Cape Coral and I said where's Cape Coral? And so I went there. Then I quit that job and here we are.
Speaker 2:There you go. That's the rest of the story.
Speaker 3:I love it.
Speaker 2:So obviously you're a very busy man. You got a lot going on. What do you enjoy? You have family. So what do you enjoy doing outside of work?
Speaker 3:Right now I'm flipping a house. I know it sounds crazy, but I, you know, I explained this to my wife. Like I said, we have four kids, we have five businesses, we're very busy and all of our businesses are small and so, um, if you know much about small businesses, they don't really make any money until you get to a pretty sizable number and so I can't really goof off much. And but a lot of people spend a few hours a weekend playing golf, and I spend a few hours a weekend flipping a house with a friend of mine. We're doing all the uh, we're doing all the manual labor ourselves. You know replacing joyce, you know hanging drywall and all that sort of things we're doing ourselves. It's very slow because we're getting old and there's only two of us, but but yeah, I tell people I don't, I can't afford to have a hobby that doesn't pay me money and not a lot of hobbies pay you money, but flipping a house.
Speaker 3:It's fun, it's a good workout. You get to learn something that's right a bit. Especially, they build them different down here. I'm not used to this. I've built a lot of houses in my life, but never in Florida, and plus the house we're flipping is about 70 years old, so it's kind of fun. But, yeah, we've been doing that for a couple months. I know it sounds crazy.
Speaker 2:No, that sounds like fun. That's absolutely. Yeah, it's been a good time.
Speaker 3:It's a good experience, good experience. So is there one thing you wish our listeners knew about you that maybe they're not aware of? Oh, our team, our team is, if I have one. I'm not a very talented person, nor am I very smart, but one thing I think I'm okay at and I have a history to prove it is that I'm pretty good at picking people, people and obviously that takes work and trial and error, but we have a really good team of really good people. That that, compared to most our competitors, they are. They are kind, they work hard, they vacuum before, during and after a job. You know just those little extra steps.
Speaker 3:We had a customer a couple weeks ago. I just got back from vacation and then a lady called me and said hey, you were at my laundry room yesterday and it's flooded. There's water everywhere. Mistakes happen.
Speaker 3:A GM, our install manager, and I went over there and there wasn't that much water and it wasn't a big deal. We tore everything out and replaced it. It took us a couple hours, not a big deal. It cost money, but what else am I going to do? It's super important to me to do the right thing, and so so we cleaned it up, we vacuumed and dried and we tore everything out and we replaced it all. And when we left she said you know, by the way, I have to tell you your team is great, lori is great, jim is great, juan's fantastic, and she's listing all these names and I said you know, it's not often that you flood somebody's house and they thank you on the way out, and so I was very proud of that. I've had a lot of. You know, the four letter word in home building is leak. You're not allowed to say that.
Speaker 2:I've had one but I've dealt with it many times, but I've never had someone thank me on the way out the door.
Speaker 3:That is awesome. That speaks volumes. Yeah, yes, sir, if you have good people doing good activities, you will have success there you go.
Speaker 2:So how would our listeners go about contacting you if they had any questions?
Speaker 3:concerns needs yeah, so we have your standard website, facebook, instagram, things like that. It's all Florida Closets and more, all spelled out. All the good domains are taken. So we have. You know I've never counted them, but there's at least 100 letters in ours. But Facebook is where we do most of our activity. It's our demographic. Most of them are on Facebook, and so you know, like I always tell people, I don't think I've ever sold anybody a closet under 30. And so we have, you know, people like me and you are our customers.
Speaker 3:We're on Facebook sharing recipes, you know.
Speaker 2:That's it. Family pictures.
Speaker 3:So Facebook and uh and our website. They're all kind of linked together. But if you look for Florida closets and more, you can find us.
Speaker 2:Perfect, any last words for our listeners.
Speaker 3:Um, no, no, Um, come, come see us, you know. Uh, excited to meet you and, um, you know I appreciate the time with you. Jim, is your nickname Cabo or Cabo, cabo, Cabo?
Speaker 2:Cabo San.
Speaker 3:, you have a house in Cabo.
Speaker 2:I wish I had a house in Cabo. Is that?
Speaker 3:where you are right now. I should be. I should be. You've got this background. I'm obviously in a bedroom. You have a background that hides where you are background. I'm obviously in a bedroom, you have a background that hides where you are. No, I just want everyone to. If you choose us or choose somebody else, either way, you should at least research, look into some closet systems. They're not as expensive as you think and they really will save you five minutes every time you get dressed.
Speaker 3:It sounds dumb, but think about it, it really it really does add up and so and we do free design consultations. So there's we do not mind wasting an hour with you measuring your room and seeing your space, cause we can spend time with you and we get to interact with you, and even if you don't buy anything cool with us, so you know, give us a call, we'll come by and check it out.
Speaker 2:Perfect Conley, it's been a pleasure getting to know you. Thanks for being such a good neighbor and I hope to see you on the community soon.
Speaker 1:All right, thanks, cabo. Thank you for listening to the good neighbor podcast. To nominate your favorite local businesses to be featured on the show, go to gnpestero. com That's gnpestero. com, or call 239-296-2621.