American Dream Achieved
IBA, as a fifty-year old business brokerage firm serving the entrepreneurial community of the Pacific Northwest, has been uniquely positioned since before the American Bicentennial celebration of 1976 to witness and hear the stories of thousands of people who have lived the American dream through entrepreneurship creating beloved businesses by employees, customers, and communities while finding personal fulfillment and financial prosperity through execution of their ideas, hard work, perseverance, and ability. In an effort to share these stories heard throughout the years by our team of business brokers, who are commonly regarded as the “best listeners” in the M&A industry, IBA has retained highly regarded writer, Nesha Ruther, to tell their stories. It is our goal to share one story a month. It is our hope that you will find the stories as inspirational and motivational as they are to us and the buyers who bought the businesses in IBA facilitated transactions in Washington, Oregon, and Alaska.
The Story of Brad Vogel of Vogel’s Carpets
By Nesha Ruther
When Brad Vogel was a child, his father was the principal of a small Christian high school. During the summer months while school was out, he would install carpets. “My mom’s brothers did it when wall-to-wall carpeting was pretty new, so my dad learned from my uncle on the weekends and he would do it on the side,” Brad says.
When he was old enough, Brad would help his father with his side-business. In Brad’s words, “getting paid $2 an hour to sleep half the time,” which is not a bad deal. When Brad graduated high school, he got a summer job doing what he already knew how to do: installing carpets.
As a college student, Brad’s life took a dramatic turn when his girlfriend at the time got pregnant. Faced with a whole new set of responsibilities, Brad dropped out of school and began looking for a job that could support his growing family. “I just did what I could to make the most money, and carpet installation was a profitable business at the time,” he says. “For a 19, 20-year-old kid, I was always making more money than any of my friends.”
Despite the popularity of wall-to-wall carpeting, few contractors knew how to install it. This meant that those who did were able to get away with a certain amount of unprofessional behavior. “Installers could be really flakey, they would show up late or not at all. They were kind of in control because there wasn’t enough of them to meet demand.”
Brad and his colleagues, however, were committed to doing good work and behaving professionally, which led to their services being in high demand. “We were young people getting big paychecks,” he recalls.
While Brad always behaved professionally on the job, a young person’s first taste of success can hit them like a drug, and when the workday was over, he went a little wild. Paired with the heavy responsibility of supporting his family, Brad began to cope in unhealthy ways. “I got into some problems,” he says candidly. “I was a kid, married to a person I didn’t really love, going through a situation that was chaotic and traumatic, and I got into it. I partied a little bit too much because I thought I deserved it, because I was doing all the right things and taking responsibility for my stuff.”
This dynamic would become a recurring pattern throughout Brad’s life and career. Rather than his reliance on substances negatively impacting his work or his ability to take responsibility, the two fueled each other. Brad was a deeply responsible, high-performing individual, whose commitment to doing the right thing justified and enabled his reliance on substances.
In his early twenties, Brad would spend some time in rehab, where he met a group of carpet installers doing commercial work. “I had only done new construction, and commercial was a totally different industry, so when I got out [of rehab] I started working for them and learning the commercial side of the business,” he says.
As Brad began to develop his career, his father was beginning to feel burnt out of his. “My dad was sick of his job,” Brad says. “He wasn’t being paid anything, no matter what he did he was always in the wrong because if he pleased one side of the community, he pissed off another. One day I said to him, ‘Let’s go into business together.’”
Brad’s father agreed, and in 1986 the pair opened a carpet cleaning and installation business, that they naturally called Vogel’s Carpets. Brad’s father took out a loan on his house, out of which they operated the business, and the pair bought a van and a carpet-cleaning machine.
It wasn’t long before they decided to slightly pivot. “We realized carpet cleaning was full of dog and cat piss,” Brad laughs, “Gross, nasty. We still did it, but it wasn’t like we pumped a lot of energy into it. I would install the carpet which basically kept the business afloat.”
Alongside installation, Brad realized there was also money to be made in selling carpet. “We bought carpet from this guy, as a subcontractor, and it just grew. Pretty soon we were selling more and more carpet, to the point where we had to say, ‘We’re not going to install any carpet that we ourselves aren’t selling.’” The success of carpet sales led to Brad finding a small store front, and Vogel’s Carpets moved out of Brad’s father’s home into a brick-and-mortar location.
The growth of Vogel’s Carpets was largely organic. While they did occasionally put out advertisements and send out mailers, Brad doesn’t attribute much success to those efforts. “We didn’t do any giant campaigns to drum up business and stuff, it just grew slowly on its own,” he says. “I was really motivated at the time,” he says. “The world hadn’t kicked me down yet and I thought anything was possible.”
Over time, Brad and his father each hired an employee to help manage their respective workloads, and Brad’s mom would also contribute to the business. “She answered the phones, which we thought it was really important to have a live person picking up calls,” he says.
Still, at the end of the day, it was just Brad and his dad. While the pair loved being in business together and deeply admired each other, their working relationship did have some challenges. “My father wasn’t a businessman,” Brad says smiling, “He was a very nice person, one of the best people anybody’s ever met. When it comes to business, maybe he was too nice sometimes.”
Brad’s father’s generosity sometimes meant going weeks without collecting payment for jobs. “We gave people too much credit,” Brad says. “They wouldn’t pay us promptly and it would get a little out of hand. We were always tight on money and when I went to get gas and put in my card, I wasn’t sure if it was going to work. Eventually my dad and I had to start playing good-cop bad-cop with clients, and that worked.”
Still, their professional partnership thrived because of their mutual admiration and love for one another. “We always got along. We didn’t fight; we weren’t volatile. Sure, we got into some arguments, but we were always both quick to say sorry, so it worked.”
As the years passed, Brad got divorced, married again, and had another child. As his life grew, so too did the business. “It wasn’t a fast thing, but we would always be open when we said we were, we didn’t close early, and we always had a live person answering the phone. We were busy and after a while we moved into a place on Aurora Avenue that was bigger and had better visibility and bigger showrooms,” Brad says.
One night, Brad got a knock on the door that changed his life forever. “It was somebody with papers telling me that there was a paternity suit, and I was being named as a possible father.” In addition to his child from his first marriage, and his child with his current wife (who at the time was pregnant with a second child) Brad discovered that he had nine-year-old, that he previously was unaware of. “I had four kids before I was thirty,” he says.
Like he did when his girlfriend first got pregnant in college, Brad responded to life’s challenges by throwing himself into his work to support the people relying on him. Unfortunately, throwing himself into his work also exacerbated his reliance on alcohol. “I had so much that I had to deal with at an early age, and I thought I could do whatever I wanted because I was always doing the right thing. It led to a little more partying than what was probably appropriate. I’ve always struggled with that, it’s always been a part of my life,” he says honestly.
In some ways, Brad’s success as an entrepreneur and his high performance at work actually stopped him from getting the help he needed. It is easier to identify a bad habit and change course at rock bottom, it is much harder when one is still showing up and meeting and exceeding expectations. “I would justify my partying by saying, I will go to work tomorrow. I could stay up all night long, but I was never the guy who would call in sick because he was hungover. That just didn’t happen,” Brad says. “That was my punishment, that was my penance. And frankly, giving up on my responsibilities wasn’t an option for me. There were guys I knew, who didn’t have the responsibilities I had, who are pretty destitute now. It’s really sad.”
Another factor that kept Brad’s bad habits in check was his father, who handled the company’s finances. “He was the one dealing with the money, and I get it. I get why he was concerned,” Brad says, referencing his younger years of big earning and big spending. “I also had child support to pay, so he gave me a set salary that covered that but was just barely enough. I think that was actually a large reason the business was successful, because he controlled the money, so I wasn’t getting big paychecks. I couldn’t have done it without my dad managing my money.”
Brad saw up-close the consequences of irresponsible money management. “The guys I met in rehab when I was 20, they still got big paychecks, still partied hard, were rich for a weekend and then had no money.” When those guys burned through their paychecks, they turned to Brad for business. “They all ended up working for me, and we actually became lifelong friends,” he says. “I made them all helpers, but they didn’t care, they were proud of me.”
Of all the challenges of a growing business, finding reliable staffing was always the most difficult. Brad was lucky to have friends he could rely on to work for him, but as the business developed, so did the demand for a talent that was increasingly difficult to find. “We got busier and busier, and it became harder to find good people to install,” Brad says. “That was always a problem.”
Their struggles to find good installers were not due to lack of effort, in fact, Brad and his dad both had an immense appreciation for those working in the industry. “Part of what made us successful is that my dad and I had both installed carpets, so we sympathized with the installers, we knew what they were going through. We didn’t say, ‘Oh they’re just the installers,’” Brad says. “Because that’s what a lot of people say and think. The installers don’t count. They’re dirty. The problem with the carpet and flooring industry is a lot of installers are getting paid the same amount I was getting in 1985 to do the same job. That’s why there’s a lot of resentment.”
This challenge only compounded when Brad himself took a back seat from installing. “When I was in my early 30s, I realized I couldn’t do installations anymore, it was becoming physically painful in my knees, my back, everywhere.” Brad saw, firsthand, his uncle, who had taught his father how to install, have severe knee issues at only 35 because of the work.
As anyone who has ever worked a physically demanding job knows, the body cares little for the affairs of business, and the timing is not always ideal. “I had just bought a new house. I also had lost one of my biggest clients, so when I switched to not doing the installs, I was worried. It felt like very bad timing,” Brad says.
That is on top of the emotional difficulty it takes for an entrepreneur who has always prided himself on taking care of his responsibilities, to put some of that responsibility in other people’s hands. “I never felt like I was the best at installations, but I was good at striking the balance between quality and speed, and not everyone can do that,” Brad says. “Giving that responsibility to someone else felt like a huge leap of faith.”
Thankfully, this leap of faith paid off, and in 2005, Vogel’s Carpets had an enormous win that altered the trajectory of the business. “One day, some people came into the shop and told us that we were rated really highly on the internet. At this point the internet was in its infancy, so I had no idea, I was like ‘Okay, whatever, who cares?’” Brad laughs. “Three more people in one day came into the store talking about some rating, so I was like ‘We have to check this out and see what’s going on.”
Vogel’s Carpets hadn’t just been rated highly, they had been rated highly by Puget Sound Consumer’s Checkbook, an extremely popular site that essentially functions as a local Consumer Report. “Somehow, we had been rated the number one carpet store in the whole of greater Puget Sound.”
Years later, Brad still speaks about this victory with a degree of awe in his voice. “Puget Sound Consumer’s Checkbook had three categories: service, installation, and price. We were the only carpet business that got checks on all three categories. And we hadn’t done anything other than run the business as usual. It was a really amazing moment,” he says.
If business had been good prior to the Consumer’s Checkbook endorsement, from there it absolutely took off. “We were really busy. We had to hire a bookkeeper and then a few other people just to keep up,” he says.
In addition to the challenges of finding quality installers, it can be difficult to onboard new staff into an environment without established systems and processes. “We weren’t a corporation that had established training systems. For so many years it had just been me and my dad, so it was hard bringing in anybody who wasn’t us,” Brad says. “It was challenging learning to teach people to do the things that we had always done ourselves. It was hard to give those responsibilities away.”
Still, taking the effort to train new staff and delegate responsibilities helped tremendously, and allowed the business to take advantage of all the new business coming their way. “We were finally making good money. I knew that the credit card was going to work when I went to the gas pump,” Brad laughs.
This was also in large part thanks to the location of the shop on Aurora Avenue, which had a high concentration of wealth. Vogel’s Carpets also became known for their successful installations of wool carpet, which is notoriously difficult. Brad and his team benefitted from the trust and business of a number of high-profile figures in tech, whose names he cannot mention due to signing an NDA. “Let’s just say that some very important people came into that stupid little store,” he laughs.
As it had even when they were operating out of his father’s house, the quality and professionalism of Vogel’s Carpets is what allowed them to stand apart. “So many installers don’t do professional work. Our guys always understood, show up on time and present quality work. Just treat it like a job, not like you’re God’s gift to the customer to be there,” Brad says.
As the years passed and responsibilities changed, Brad also began to take on the roles his father had previously managed. “When he was in his early 60s, he began to struggle with the job and I ended up doing 75% of the work,” Brad says. “Someone would say, ‘hey, approximately how much for a bedroom?’ and he would give them a number that made no sense. I’d be like ‘What? That’s not even close to reasonable.’”
This was particularly challenging because in both life and work, Brad and his dad had always been extremely close. “It was tough because he had helped me in the beginning, he kept me in line, kept me in check and not dead,” he says with a sad laugh. “We split everything 50-50, and anything extra we put back into the business, but it stopped being fair because I was doing so much more of the work.”
While Vogel’s Carpets had many hourly employees—they were running roughly eight to ten installation crews a day—they only had two other full-time employees beside Brad and his father. With such an enormous and influential member of the team no longer able to keep pace, the brunt of the work fell onto Brad’s shoulders. “It’s unfortunately a young man’s trade,” he says.
Eventually, Brad’s father switched to a commission payment, which he was happy with, but his struggles at work continued. “He was still acting weird, he couldn’t do math anymore, I don’t know how to explain it,” Brad says.
At 65, Brad’s dad was diagnosed with Lewy Body Dementia, a form of degenerative dementia similar to Alzheimer’s, that effects physical movement as well as cognitive ability, behavior, and mood. “He couldn’t work anymore after that,” Brad says. “It was tough. I was working twelve-hour days for six, six and-a-half days a week. We had really taken off those last few years, and on top of that I was doing two people’s jobs.”
Once again, Brad’s relationship with work impacted his reliance on substances. Only this time, on top of the stress of running a business and doing two jobs, he had to navigate the emotional battleground of watching his father decline. “I always had a problem with drugs and drinking, and that escalated when my dad got sick. He was my best friend. Even when I was in growing up, he was at my school so there wasn’t one year where I wasn’t seeing him pretty much every day.”
From 2008 to 2015, when Brad’s father passed, Brad balanced the demands of two jobs, with caring for his father, and the grief of watching a loved one disappear. “That was the hardest thing I’ve ever gone through,” he says.
Financially, the business was thriving, but the money and success that had previously given Brad purpose and direction had suddenly become meaningless. “I didn’t care about the money. It wasn’t worth it. He was going to die. I was going to die. I just wasn’t happy,” Brad says. “What’s money when my dad doesn’t know who I am?”
Addiction is a devastating disease, creating patterns and habits in the brain that are, if one is lucky, excruciatingly difficult to circumvent. These habits are only intensified by the kind of stress and depression Brad was grappling with. “I was drinking a lot: a beer after work turned into a couple of shooters, and after work turned into 3 o’ clock, and that turned into noon, which turned into 10 AM, eventually it got to the point where I needed to drink or else I was shaking.”
In 2013, Brad hit the rock bottom he had so long avoided when he got a DWI. Because his drinking was so intertwined with his relationship with work, he realized he had to cut both out of his life. He began to look into selling Vogel’s Carpets. “I couldn’t do it anymore or I was going to lose my mind,” he says. “I almost had a, I wouldn’t say nervous breakdown, but it felt something like that.”
By the time he began working with Gregory Kovsky and IBA, he had gotten sober, but he was still emotionally raw and reeling. “I began having this terrible anxiety that was just a nightmare,” he says. “I remember talking to Gregory and I was in a panic half the time I was in his office. I was not functioning.”
When Brad and Gregory first met, Brad was convinced he would not be able to sell the business and was going to have to close. The guilt and fear of having to let go the employees who had been with him for years intensified his mental health struggles. “I didn’t think they would be able to sell it,” he says. “I thought that if I wasn’t there, it would disappear.”
Thankfully Brad found a steady hand and a confidant in Gregory. “Gregory knew what he was doing. Despite everything I was going through, working with IBA was a great experience.” With Vogel’s Carpets stellar reputation and network of clientele, they were able to quickly secure a buyer. On the one-year anniversary of his father’s death, Brad sold Vogel’s Carpets. “I’m not religious, but I look back and it’s like, I don’t know, somebody up there made the whole process go fast and smooth,” Brad says.
Having got sober and exiting the business, Brad was finally able to focus on recovering from the emotional challenges of the past few years. “I’m in AA now. I don’t drink anymore. My life is much better, for me and the people around me, when I’m not drinking. The world’s a better place when I’m not drinking.”
Since selling Vogel’s Carpets, Brad has also left Seattle for Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. He brings his computer out with him onto his balcony, where he shows me beautiful view of the coastline. On the day we spoke, the sky was bright blue, and the sand was golden. “It’s 10 am and its 80-something degrees right now,” he grins. “This is a dream; it’s a dream come true.”
While the past few years have not been without their challenges—Brad and his wife divorced in 2021—he has done a miraculous job of obtaining the kind of financial and mental stability that for much of his life seemed elusive. “I don’t do this pity party anymore, and I don’t take life seriously anymore. I’ve turned into a child again,” he says with a smile. For someone who had an enormous amount of responsibility from a very young age, this new phase of Brad’s life has been a revelation. “My life is just fun now. For the first time in my life, I can do what I want, when I want, and it’s liberating. It’s just amazing.”
For Brad, the American Dream was always relatively simple: “My dream was always to retire early and have a nice place on the water,” he says.
Judging by the view from his balcony, he’s achieved that dream, and it is sunny and beautiful.
Nesha Ruther
Nesha Ruther is a writer and editor from Takoma Park, Maryland. She received her BA in English Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin Madison, where she received a full tuition scholarship through the First Wave program based on academic and creative merits. She was a 2016 Young Arts winner in spoken word, a 2016 winner of the DC Commission of the Arts Larry Neal Writing Award, a 2017 winner of the Mochila Review Writing Award, which was judged by Nikki Giovanni, a 2020 winner of the University of Wisconsin’s Eudora Welty Fiction Thesis Award, and a 2022 Tin House Winter Workshop Participant. She has been commissioned to write and perform for the National Education Association, and has had work published in NarrativeNortheast, Angles Literary Magazine, Beltway Quarterly and more. She currently lives in Cincinnati Ohio, is a Lead Writer at Bond & Grace, and a co-host for the podcast Lit Talk (https://www.bondandgrace.com/the-lit-talk-podcast).