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His career started from the floor up
Wagner has helped lead Fishman’s Flooring Solutions since 2003
Bob Wagner didn’t come from the family that started Fishman Flooring Solutions in Baltimore a century ago, but he still had flooring in his blood.
Wagner, Fishman’s president since 2003 and its CEO since 2012, worked in his own family’s floor covering installation and distribution business in Philadelphia in the mid-1970s. Decades earlier, his grandmother had worked as a carpet binding seamstress. Wagner worked for other flooring companies after his family’s, then landed at Fishman as a vice president in 1997.
Under Wagner’s leadership, the business started by Albert “Mr. Al” Fishman in 1919 has adapted and grown.
Today, the company headquartered on East Lombard Street in East Baltimore ranks as the sixth largest flooring distributor in North America. It has revenue well in excess of $100 million, 240 employees and operations in 14 states.
Fishman sells both flooring and tools to install floors to installers who sell to end users in homes, sports arenas, hospitals, universities, apartment complexes and other businesses.
“So pretty much, if a floor goes on it, we’re in that business,” Wagner said.
The company started with a few scraps of fabric 100 years ago. Albert Fishman, then a 19-year-old who’d emigrated from Russia in 1906 with his parents and sisters, began selling material left over from the cutting tables of local factories. The business, then called L. Fishman & Son — named for his mother Leah — expanded into supplying the local garment industry with tailors’ trimming and industrial sewing threads.
In 1923, the company became the distributor for American Thread Co., the nation’s largest maker of industrial sewing threads, a role it played for more than 60 years. Nelson Fishman, the founder’s son, joined the business in 1958. When he heard that a maker of carpet installation supplies, Roberts Co., needed a Baltimore distributor, he stressed Fishman’s experience selling sewing supplies and won the job. Fishman split into flooring and textile divisions in 1960, then added commercial flooring products in the 1970s. As flooring became a bigger focus, Fishman sold the textile business in 1984. Nelson Fishman stayed with the company until he retired in 2012.
That’s when the business became entirely owned by its employees, through an employee stock ownership plan.
“We’re an employer among lots of employers in every region,” Wagner said. “One of the themes that we have to talk to prospective employees about is the ownership experience, how employees get to participate in the success of the company.”
The company has adapted as people buy and sell flooring on the internet instead of in-person and as tastes have shifted from carpet to more popular hard surface flooring.
“We’re in a rapidly changing industry,” Wagner said. “We have to communicate with customers and we have to stay in touch with new trends. We have to change with the times.”
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