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Meet Randy Price and Ben Feliciano of Copper State Flooring; LLC in Mesa and East Valley

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Today we’d like to introduce you to Randy Price and Ben Feliciano.

Randy and Ben, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
Ben and I have been in the flooring industry for some time now. Ben is from New York and started in a family owned business working summers while in high school. He continued in the industry while attending college in New York, then made it his career. He moved to Arizona in his early 20’s and continued in the flooring industry. He soon partnered with a friend and they installed flooring for many of the established flooring stores in the Phoenix Valley. Unfortunately, his partner at the time was unreliable and he and Ben parted ways after a few years. Ben continued installing hardwood flooring until he was offered a job by a local flooring store. Ben accepted and worked there until we opened Copper State Flooring.

I had a little different introduction to the flooring industry. I started in California in construction in my early 20’s and ended up hurting my back and needing surgery. After I recovered from surgery, I wasn’t able to return to the construction industry. I was married with two children at the time and wasn’t sure how I was going to support them. Luckily, my childhood friend was a hardwood flooring contractor and asked me to invest in his business. I had received a small amount of money after my back injury and used that to open a flooring showroom with him. That lasted for a few years but we were young and inexperienced and with such limited capital, we were unable to overcome some difficult financial times and ended up closing our doors. Even though our business failed, I learned a lot about the flooring industry and even installed it for a while towards the end. I then moved my family to Arizona in the spring of 2006. That’s when I met my now business partner, Ben. Oddly enough, I was hired by the same person that hired Ben just 18 months earlier. Ben and I worked together at that flooring store for over 11 years. In 2015, the owner of the business passed away unexpectedly and his young sons took over and you know how that goes… We fought the good fight, but after a couple of years, we couldn’t take it anymore. So, in our mid-40’s we decided to reinvent ourselves and open our store. We opened in June of 2017 and have fought through the learning curve regarding taxes, accounting, inventory, advertising, cash flow issues and everything else that it takes to run a business. We have been fortunate enough to see success early on and even needed to hire a salesperson and the business is continuing to grow. Ben’s son, Bennie helps out along with my son, Ethan a few hours a week while they both attend CGCC. My oldest daughter, Samantha, is a junior at ASU and she works every Saturday. Our wives aren’t involved with the business as they are both working professionals themselves.

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Like I mentioned in the previous section, there have been a few bumps for both Ben and me before we met, and also after we met. I’d say the biggest struggle we faced was the passing of our previous boss, the owner of the flooring store we worked at for over a decade. He was a fair, honest man that allowed us to have some freedoms as long as we produced, which we did! When his son took over, they were both very condescending and quite the micro-managers. We weren’t allowed to cough without asking for permission. They were both in their 20’s while Ben and I were in our 40’s but they thought they knew it all. We only lasted about two years under their management before we knew that we had to leave and do something else. It was then that we opened up Copper State Flooring.

Please tell us about your business.
We sell all types of flooring; wood, laminate, vinyl, carpet and tile. Ben and I are wood specialists, that’s what we’ve done since we entered this industry, and that’s one of the reasons we hired Brian back in early 2019. Brian has been in the industry for 15 years and has worked for a couple of stores that sell a lot of carpet and tile Brian allows us to be experts in all of the floor coverings due to his knowledge of carpet and tile. Ben and I are now quite versed in carpet and tile thanks to Brian. Between the three of us, we have over 60 years in the industry.

I think that two things set us apart. First, we always do what’s right for the customer, even if it means that we aren’t profitable. Both Ben and I have been screwed over in the past by companies that knew we couldn’t fight back and we promised each other that we’d never to that to anyone. My late father used to say, “is selling your integrity worth a few extra bucks”? That hit home with me and that’s how both Ben and I run our business. Secondly, we are experts in our industry. With Ben’s experience as a master wood flooring installer and with all of the jobs that I managed when working with my first partner, we can see the job from a different perspective. There’s nothing that we haven’t seen so we’re able to properly prepare our customers for whatever flooring project they need. There’s nothing like the salesman having first done the labor, in any industry!

What moment in your career do you look back most fondly on?
I think our proudest moment is yet to come… Don’t get me wrong, there have been a few noteworthy moments in our short career, but nothing that makes us sit back and feel that we’ve arrived quite yet.

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