From left to right: Carol Salamon, Mitch Salamon, Mark Salamon and Karen Salamon Shouse are the second and third generations of the family to work at the flooring company.

Schools, car dealerships and senior housing facilities make up a majority of Salamon Flooring Inc.’s business.

When Mitch Salamon speaks about his grandkids, he talks about their character and academic and athletic accomplishments with the kind of pride most grandparents have. But unlike most grandparents, Mitch can also speak about the next generation of his family from an employer’s perspective. They are the fourth generation working in the family business, Salamon Flooring Inc.

Most of Mitch’s seven grandchildren, who range in age from 11 to 21, are still in school, but that has not stopped them from getting to work. They get that from Mitch, who was just 12 when he started working at his father’s flooring company.

“Instead of playing basketball at the YMCA after school with my friends, I was working,” he says. “I was watching the store while my dad was out installing. He started paying me commission as motivation to keep me interested.”

It worked.

All these years later, Mitch remains interested in the company his father started in Holyoke, Massachusetts, in 1943. The company later moved to West Springfield, Massachusetts, where it continues to operate more than three quarters of a century later.

The Team

Salamon Flooring serves customers throughout Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, eastern New York and the southern portions of Vermont and New Hampshire. It sells and installs a variety of flooring options. Among the most common: broadloom or carpet tile, hardwood, granite, ceramic tile, sheet vinyl as well as luxury vinyl tile and vinyl composition tile.

Mitch’s team is made up of about a dozen staff and office employees, including his wife, Carol, as Treasurer, children Mark Salamon and Karen Salamon Shouse, and college-aged grandson, Beau Salamon, who has spent summers and other school breaks working as an estimator and installer.

Salamon Flooring also has a close relationship with an installation force of 50 specialized installers. According to Mitch, this allows the company to multitask and better serve its customers. The workforce includes utilization of a variety of mixed rationalities for specialized trades. Because of stringent construction schedules dictated by general contractors and developers, it is crucial to staff the site with talented, specialized and qualified installation specialists.

“We know their abilities and reputations and require them to perform up to our standards,” he says.

While over the years Salamon Flooring’s work has shifted and evolved from initially serving residential customers to mainly completing commercial projects, the company’s values, work ethic and customer focus have not changed.

For Mitch, being able to hit deadlines regardless of any circumstance surrounding the job is a major point of pride. “We’re the last ones in on a construction site, but we still have to meet that date, even if nobody before us did,” he says.

Commitment to Excellence

Customers have taken notice of that commitment. At Holyoke Mall at Ingleside, where Salamon Flooring has installed flooring at more than 85 stores—some of them five times when new stores moved in—the company became such a go-to, reliable contractor that Mitch often landed new work without even trying.

“We would be on a job at a new mall, and when we came back out to the truck at the end of the day, there were people waiting for me. They left notes, business cards or blueprints on the truck asking to hire Salamon for the next job,” he says.

That credibility and longevity has propelled Salamon Flooring into each new phase.

In recent years, it has carved out a niche for itself with auto dealerships as well as assisted living centers and senior living communities along with GSA, federal, military and VA projects.

“We’ve potentially got a year’s worth of work booked in front of us,” Mitch notes. Most of that is with commercial business, but Salamon Flooring also continues to serve residential customers. The company doesn’t actively seek out those jobs, which are often from repeat customers.

It’s not just Salamon Flooring’s workforce that is multigenerational; it’s clients, too. “We serve second- and third-generation residential customers,” Mitch says. “Sometimes, people walk in who had their floors installed by my father 20 or 30 years ago.”

For Mitch, a decorated Vietnam veteran, building on the legacy his father started—and being able to do so with his children and grandchildren—is a satisfying feeling. “It’s the exception for a generational business to go on this long,” he says.

The wheels are in motion for the family tradition to continue.

Mitch learned the hands-on, installation skills and more from his father. He later taught them to his son, Mark, who started working for the company at age 15. Now his grandchildren are learning. “My installers have been impressed by my high school and college grandsons’ skills and work ethic,” Mitch notes proudly.

Community Fixture

Salamon Flooring serves its community beyond its flooring needs. Two years ago, after a particularly good year, Mitch approached West Springfield leaders looking for ways to improve life for its residents.

“We wanted to do something that was out of the town’s reach,” Mitch says.

So Salamon Flooring—and the family’s real estate company—purchased and donated a utility task vehicle for the West Springfield Fire Department. It was an item that had been on the city’s wish list.

The ATV-type unit is easy to navigate through large crowds and can reach areas that other vehicles have trouble fitting into. And, it was a valuable vehicle for retrieving injured or sick people from West Springfield’s annual Big E fair.

“It’s just something we wanted to do from the family to the town,” says Mitch, noting that he’s hopeful the businesses will be able to make additional donations in the future.

Looking Ahead

Though the fourth generation of Salamon relatives are poised to lead the family business into the next stage, Mitch isn’t eager to say goodbye to managing the challenges and celebrations of day-to-day operations. Though, stepping back here and there would be OK, he says.

“If we could stop growing and securing work, we might be able to slow down and sneak away a little more,” he says of the role he and his wife play at the company.

Working with his family has been one of the joys of Mitch’s lifetime. He recognizes how fortunate he is that everyone gets along, roots for one another’s success and genuinely likes spending time together.

“I’m proud of all we’ve achieved; we’ve done it the right way,” he says. “My dad would be as proud as I am if he was here to see what we’ve accomplished.”