Ken Cleary
Ken Cleary
Title: President, California Closets, New England
Age: 63
Experience: 15 years
Ken Cleary started out in retail before he started working at College Pro Painters and eventually becoming the CEO of College Pro International. When College Pro’s parent company, First Service, acquired California Closets, he saw how profitable the business was and how much potential it had, so he bought the six New England franchises.
Q: Did you study business management in school?
A: I studied political science in school. I started with a retail company in 1971, part time, [and] when I graduated [in 1974], they made me an offer and there were really no jobs out there. I was getting married, so I said, “OK, we’ll make this work awhile and see what happens.”
Q: Did you plan to become the CEO of a big company?
A: Not really. College Pro was a good sized company, a fascinating company. You’re dealing with college students, so it’s very educational. It was a pretty substantial business. I came in and we grew the New England business and we grew the U.S. business. Then what really hurt College Pro, in the mid-90s, was the dot-com wave took away all of our prospective college students. They were all going into dot-com internships and recruiting became very difficult. So when the California Closet thing came about, it was a great combination of what I’d learned at College Pro, which is a very educational organization. You had to train college kids about how to run a business, so you had to learn yourself. Combined with my retail experience, it made the California Closets very interesting to me.
Q: How is the high-end condo boom effecting you?
A: It’s kind of ironic because I left CollegePro in 1999 or 2000 and the dot-com crash happened in 2000–2001, so I enter into this high-end closet business with an economic downturn. We still held our own and grew the business, but they were tough years. I went from one business where the dot-com boom was hurting us to another business where it could have helped us, but the crash came and I had to wonder, can I pick ’em or what? Still, things worked out pretty good. California Closets invented closets. Before us it was poles and hooks and we were just starting to come into our own at that time.
We took over for people who were running the business like a Mom and Pop. We aggressively increased our marketing, aggressively increased our quality and aggressively went after personnel. It was very strong until, of course, 2008. Then in 2011, it took off again. We have so many more product offerings now. This showroom, for example, was redone two years ago. It has been redone with the understanding that’s happening is not in the traditional places that a Boston boom might happen. It’s not in old factory buildings or houses being renovated into new condos. It’s geared toward contemporary stuff that will go into these big high rises for the international people who are buying these things. We import our wood from Italy. It’s the highest end board company in the world.
Q: How important are your showrooms?
A: I took the showroom concept to a different level. We have more showrooms than any other franchise in the system. We believe very much in using the showroom as part of our sales tool. The closet industry isn’t huge, we’re small and there are a lot of people who don’t understand exactly what we do. The showroom makes it transparent so customers can see what we do. We try to have designers in the show rooms every day. They’re able to explain what we do.
We inventory what customers own, what they want to put in the closet. Do they have long dresses? Short dresses? How do they like to take care of their sweaters? That whole closet system is put together based on that customer’s specific needs. When someone asks us to just go into a space and put a closet in, it’s hard for us to do it. We do it, but we do it with the understanding that we are able to adjust it afterward to the customer’s needs. That’s our strength, our design team. Most of them have degrees in design. It’s a huge part of what we’re about.
Q: What don’t people get about what you do?
A: Their closet will be customized to them. What it can do as far as a fashion item for them. When they see our displays, they can’t believe what we do. We can turn a closet into a dressing room. In a lot of the new houses, if the architect knows what he’s doing, he creates a very high-end master bedroom bathroom, but before you get into that, you’re walking through a dressing room area that has everything lined up. Tie racks, shoe racks, accessory hooks. It’ll be very elegant-looking. We do a lot of lighting. We give people exactly what they want.
Q: Is your work mostly with new construction or renovations?
A: We do everything. We have a tremendous amount of repeat business. We’ll go in and do a pantry for somebody and the next thing you know we get a call and they say, “OK, we’re ready to do all our closets.” We do closets, mud rooms, pantries, garages, home offices, all that stuff. Some people even use us for entertainment centers. We’ll do a $500-$1,000 closet for someone, knowing that somewhere down the road, they’ll call us when they’re ready for a bigger job.
And we give a lifetime warranty on everything we do. Before I bought the company, I put a California Closet in my front hall closet just to see what it was all about. That was 16 years ago. I have four kids. It’s the most used closet in the house. Ask me how many problems we’ve had with it: None.
Cleary’s Top Five Favorite Things:
- California Closets’ Brighton showroom
- New England Patriots
- The 120 great people that make California Closets New England the best
- The Wellbridge Health Club
- Family: his wife (also a world-class grandmother), four sons, three grandsons and a fourth on the way.
