Jim Hardaway has been a successful salesman for over three decades. He sells office furniture to government and Fortune 500 clients. But when he quit his job in 2019, he didn’t like retirement, so he got a new gig: He helps keep old office furniture out of landfills.
It wasn’t planned, but Hardaway, 65, has found a rounded nature in his career that he seems more proud of. What’s more, he said, he wasn’t close to finishing the job.
Hardaway’s career began in 1984 for one of the top office furniture brands, Herman Miller. The company, whose name is generally synonymous with the highest modern furniture design ideas, employed designers such as George Nelson, who was chief designer at Herman Miller for a while, as well as the incomparable Charles and Ray Eames – yes, that Eames.
For about 35 years, Hardaway, taking on various roles here as he rose through the ranks, was tasked with filling the office with the various products Herman Miller sold.
“The Herman Miller brand is so popular that it opens a lot of doors. I wouldn’t say the product sells itself, because no product does,” Hardaway said. fortune. “I call architects and designers, I call heads of real estate, facilities managers, people like that; people who make decisions about commercial office furniture for the company.
Offices—and the companies they draw upon when trying to demonstrate productivity or collaboration—have changed drastically over the decades Hardaway has been in the business. They sell office furniture to the IRS, the Social Security Administration, and help furnish offices in the judicial and executive branches. He has Fortune 500 clients like United Airlines, and even holds the record for the largest account closed at Herman Miller, he said, which was a $125 million-plus contract to complete the company’s entire campus.
Hardaway saw offices move from the rat-like cubicles of the 80s, to lower walls meant to foster collaboration, open plans, and then to different spaces for different types of work throughout the day. Over the years, Herman Miller has provided everything from cubicle walls and workstations to the now iconic Aeron office chair.
But as the workforce and corporate needs continue to force office design to change, much of the furniture and products Hardaway sells is being phased out.
Office furniture – the main source of furniture waste in landfills – is about 8.5 million tons of the 10 million tons of furniture that ends up in landfills every year.
During his time at Herman Miller, Hardaway and his team worked hard to prepare their clients’ offices. There was an entire design process, he said, to make sure he had everything he wanted and needed to fit the company’s culture.
“Culture doesn’t always happen in the office,” Hardaway says, “but furniture can be a catalyst.”
But at the end of the day, companies merge, or fold, or move, or change with the times, and who is there to take the office chair they no longer want? “What do we do? We sell solutions. And what we’re left with is furniture.
After about six months of retirement in 2019, when he and his wife were traveling down the Nile in Egypt, Hardaway started his own consulting business. Then the pandemic struck, and he was forced to pivot again. He was considering a new opportunity when the CEO of environmental lawyer and workplace decommissioning company Green Standards came calling.
Hardaway is familiar with the company from his days at Herman Miller. In Green Standards’ 12 years as an organization, it touts has saved 100,000 tons of office furniture from landfills and diverted more than 240,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions.
Green Standards works with companies like Google, Microsoft and United Airlines to develop strategies to resell, recycle, and donate office furniture that companies no longer use.
Hardaway never expected he would end up working on the back end of the industry to which he has dedicated the majority of his professional life. It was during the pandemic, he said, that he knew he wanted to spend the latter part of his career doing something driven by purpose.
The so-called “aha” moment early on in Green Standards was when watching a case study we did with an old client, United Airlines. The research was conducted when United moved into new offices, and Hardaway was still at Herman Miller at the time, working with airlines to sell office furniture for the new space.
“I’m working on a new project, Green Standards takes the products I sold in 1998… That’s when it hit me, I’ve come full circle, and I can make a difference,” he said. “In sales, our success is always based on your goals, right? I sold $10 million this year, or I did this or I did that. Now, I define success as making a difference. And like I said, I’m not done yet. That’s why I’m also failed to retire, because I didn’t finish.
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