Founders' Forum

The $70M SEO Breakthrough: How Paul Downs Built a Global Brand

• Marc Bernstein / Paul Downs • Episode 99

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What if a single Google search could transform your small business overnight? That’s exactly what happened to Paul Downs, a custom furniture maker who went from struggling to find clients to building boardroom tables for the Pentagon, Federal Reserve, and even SEAL Team 6.

In this episode, Paul shares his 38-year entrepreneurial journey, from launching his business with no formal training to navigating the highs and lows of running a company in a rapidly evolving market. His big break came in 2003 when a photo of his boardroom table unexpectedly soared to the top of Google’s search rankings. That moment of digital luck led to nearly $70 million in revenue and a client list spanning the globe. But success wasn’t always smooth—Paul opens up about the challenges of surviving the 2008 recession, a turbulent business partnership, and the evolving landscape of craftsmanship in a digital world.


Key Takeaways:

  • The Power of SEO: How a single well-ranked image can change a business forever.
  • Resilience Through Challenges: Lessons from nearly shutting down during the 2008 recession.
  • Modern Leadership in a Traditional Industry: Why Paul is rethinking management to attract the next generation of craftspeople.
  • Adapting to a Changing Market: How video conferencing and shifting client needs are shaping the future of boardroom furniture.


Paul’s story is a testament to the power of adaptation, perseverance, and digital opportunity. Whether you're an entrepreneur, a craftsperson, or a business leader, this episode is packed with insights on navigating change and seizing unexpected opportunities.

Listen now and discover how a mix of luck, strategy, and resilience can redefine your business.


About Paul Downs:

Paul Downs started making custom furniture in 1986, after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in engineering. His company employs 28 superb craftsmen, producing all of their work in Bridgeport, Pennsylvania.

Connect:

Website pauldowns.net

LinkedIn linkedin.com/in/paul-downs-278bb96

Instagram instagram.com/pauldownscustom


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Announcer:

Entrepreneur, founder, author and financial advisor, Marc Bernstein helps high-performing business owners turn their visions into reality. Through his innovative work and the Forward Focus Forums, Marc connects entrepreneurs to resources that fuel their success. Founders Forum is a radio show and podcast where entrepreneurs share their journeys, revealing the lessons they've learned and the stories behind their success. Join Marc and his guests for a mix of inspiration, valuable insights and a little fun. Now let's dive in.

Marc Bernstein:

Good morning America. How are you? This morning we have, first of all, it's a beautiful day in Philadelphia, another beautiful fall day, and we have Jess Hallahan in the studio with me today from Journey to Yourself. And good morning, jess, good morning. And we have Paul Downs with us, who I'll introduce in a minute, but this is a pre-recorded show today, not live on the radio. So it'll be live on the radio on WWDB AM Philadelphia later, but we just had a show and so you can connect the dots as you're listening to this.

Marc Bernstein:

The day after Election Day, we had Joe Arcangelo on the show and we talked about the impact of the election on people, because half of the country pretty much is not happy with the results and we knew that was going to happen one way or the other. And in the studio we're talking. We make it a point not to talk politics and we're not going to, but there was an issue that came up that is relevant to the conversation with entrepreneurs and so, jess, I'll let you introduce that, and I think Paul has some thoughts on that.

Jess Hallahan:

Yeah, of course, when we were talking offline, we were talking about tariffs and how they might be affecting you know, your business and just other small businesses that are like yours. Do you want to put in any insight?

Paul Downs:

Yeah Well, first of all, thank you for having me on this morning. It's a real honor to be here. Our pleasure.

Paul Downs:

And I think that before we talk about my reaction to tariffs, it would be useful to know what I do. I am a manufacturer located here in Pennsylvania and we produce a product which is mostly labor and with materials mixed in, and I have a feeling that if tariffs are imposed on foreign imports, it's going to affect quite a bit of my supply chain, particularly the little things that you don't think of as being subject to tariffs, like we use a lot of nuts and bolts and screws, we use a lot of MDF that comes from Canada and we use woods from all over the world, and if those things become more expensive because of tariffs, what do you think I'm going to do?

Marc Bernstein:

I'm going to raise my prices.

Paul Downs:

So I don't see tariffs as being much of a solution to existing high prices, and I'm just one little tiny piece of our whole national economy, and everybody who's running a business that buys something that becomes more expensive is going to do the same thing. We're going to have to raise prices to cover our costs, and we're not going to wait around either. Our suppliers are going to need to raise their prices immediately on what they're selling in order to have enough money to buy something that is more expensive or to pay the tariff as it's levied on them, and I think that that's something that most people don't understand about situations where prices are going up that there's not some adjustment period where the people you're buying from continue to sell to you at the same price. They immediately raise their prices because, in order for them to restock their businesses, they have to now spend more than they might have been charging in the past. So I don't see tariffs as a good thing, but I've clearly others have different opinions and we'll see how it plays out.

Marc Bernstein:

The irony of all this is and you could look at both sides of campaigns and what they say versus what they do but the irony is that America who's very concerned about inflation right now, even though the rate of inflation is coming down, prices are still up elected a president who, in effect, if he does what he says he's going to do, will possibly cause more inflation. So it is what it is, not a political statement, it's just we're looking at it as economists right here and saying what could happen. So thank you, paul, and let me introduce Paul. So Paul Downs started making custom furniture that's what he's alluding to in 1986, after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in engineering Kind of an interesting story.

Marc Bernstein:

And his company employs 28 superb craftsmen producing all their work in Bridgeport, pennsylvania, and you'll see even that the kind of furniture that he makes has evolved over the years and that's part of his story. So welcome Paul, thank you, thanks for being here. And so let's talk about that. Let's talk of his story. So welcome Paul, thank you, thanks for being here. And so let's talk about that. Let's talk about your journey. You know what you grew up, your interests, you went to school for engineering and how you ended up in the furniture business.

Paul Downs:

Well, I've always been someone who liked to make things and long before I got to college I was building all kinds of things with my hands. But I'm also someone who's academically qualified to go to a fancy school and that's where I ended up. And a couple of years in, as I was studying engineering, I realized that oh my goodness, engineers just sit behind a desk all day and do calculus and that sounds like hell to me. So when I graduated, I decided that I might go on and be an architect and preparatory to that, I got a job on a construction site and was working as a helper for a Finnish carpenter and this guy was always going on about how cool it was to make furniture and how you have your shop and you just make things and people come in and it's fine craftsmanship and I was like that sounds great, that's what I'm doing. So I happened to have a small amount of money inherited from my grandmother and I rented an empty row house shell in Manioc and bought some tools and just started making stuff.

Marc Bernstein:

So you went right into entrepreneurship, which is pretty interesting.

Paul Downs:

Yeah, and this being the mid, mid 80s, it was actually probably a huge mistake, because it meant that I was now a businessman without access to any training, knowledge or experience in how to be a business person, and back then it was much, much harder to get your hands on basic information, because this is pre-internet on basic information, because this is pre-internet and also just at the point in sort of the economic history where entrepreneurship was beginning to be a thing.

Paul Downs:

But it wasn't really a thing, and so I spent a lot of time struggling to master basic business processes. And what was good for me was that I'm actually really good at selling and designing and was a pretty good furniture maker, taught myself and turned out I could do it. So I was able to get the business going and we ended up specializing in custom dining tables and chairs, because that's a product that people would spend money on, something that I could make in my small shop successfully, and we developed a local market, mostly lower mainline Philadelphia area.

Marc Bernstein:

Paul, at that time not to interrupt, but at that time, how many employees did you have?

Paul Downs:

Got to about five or six employees and eventually took a partnership with one of my customers, and that allowed us to expand our operation a bit and move into a bigger shop, and we were still thinking that we would be making dining room furniture but try to reach out to a national market.

Paul Downs:

Now, at the same time that was happening this was 2002, 2003, something that I'd done four years earlier sort of dropped out of the sky into my lap, which was in 1998, I had one client who wanted a boardroom table, and we made one for him and put a picture of it up on our first website, and then, in 2003, google decided that that picture was going to be the top organic search result for anybody searching for a boardroom table.

Paul Downs:

I had nothing to do with this, it just happened one day, and so I get a phone call from a guy in South Dakota. He's like can you make me one of these boardroom tables? And I'm staring at the phone like who the hell are you and how did you find me? Two days later, I'm on the phone with someone in Kyrgyzstan who's putting up an oil company headquarters, and ever since that day in 2003, every day we get somewhere between 3 and 15 calls and emails from somebody somewhere who's looking for a custom boardroom table, and it turned out to be a pretty good business because there's not that many people who know how to do it.

Marc Bernstein:

TGFG right.

Paul Downs:

Yeah, thank God for Google. Yeah, I mean, it's really worked out for me.

Marc Bernstein:

Since that day, we've had revenues of about almost 70 million bucks from that one.

Paul Downs:

That's unbelievable. Yeah, completely transformed my business, and so the business was there and it took me a while for my management skills to catch up. But at this point we're a well-established company and we're doing business with pretty much everybody everywhere, because everybody needs a boardroom table, it seems like. So we do business with small school boards in Kansas and the military and big manufacturers, and you name it. We're in every state, we're in every Canadian province, we're in Alaska, we're in Hawaii, panama, caribbean Basin this is just from Google searches people calling us and saying, hey, we need this thing and we don't know where to get it. And we say, okay, we're going to help.

Marc Bernstein:

Do you distribute and ship yourselves? Yes, we do.

Paul Downs:

I mean, one of the amazing things about the modern world is the logistics chain that's available to even the smallest businesses. So we're not a huge corporation. We don't have the resources of some of our clients, but we can call up a truck and get something on it and have it delivered to Alaska in three days, and it's not a huge hassle. It's just the way the world works.

Marc Bernstein:

Well, you mentioned a couple of times you struggled with the business issues and then I think you got to a point where you had some help with that, correct?

Paul Downs:

I did and the first help I had was just having a partner, because before then I had done nothing. You know, like I really didn't know what I was doing.

Marc Bernstein:

Partner meaning this was a company partner, right, or this was an individual partner.

Paul Downs:

This was an individual partner, a guy named Larry Ballin who bought into the company in 2003. Right, and he was, in my mind, going to be the. He was a successful manufacturer and he was going to show me how to fix my company and how to make it work, and his wife was a CPA, so the two of them had been a team running his previous companies, and Larry being the big ideas guy, the sales guy, very nice guy, inspiring guy, and his wife, mary, being the one who would actually sort of get down and dirty in the books and make sure they were making money. And so I was really looking forward to this partnership. And we had a piece of bad luck, which is about a month after we formed the partnership and Mary had come in and started fixing up my books. She actually just died in her sleep at age 54. And so all of a sudden now I have a partner who's missing the sort of the operational piece that has led to his previous success, and neither of us really saw what was missing for a number of years.

Paul Downs:

So we floundered around, we lost a lot of money and then the recession came of 2008. And we were already in trouble when that happened and it was just a disaster. But we scraped through in 2009 and 2010. And I went from 22 people in 2008 to six by the end of 2009 and came within about two days of running out of cash. And then the business started to revive in 2010. And at the same time that was happening, something else sort of weird happened to me, which is I got the opportunity to write for the New York Times about my business struggles. So I started writing regularly in their business section and they had a blog called You're the Boss and for the first time, because this was an online thing, I started getting a lot of feedback from the people who read about all the stupid things I was doing. They were like oh, you should do these other things.

Marc Bernstein:

And I had always relied on advice from Larry but nobody else. It was like reverse, dear Abby for a business, kind of thing.

Paul Downs:

Yeah, it really was, and so all of a sudden I'm being exposed to different ways of thinking about how to run a business, and eventually that led me to join Vistage, which was also extremely helpful in introducing me to sets of ideas about how to run a business that were more up to date than what Larry could bring to the table. I mean, god bless him. He was a wonderful guy. He passed away a couple of years ago, but he just was more equipped for the world of the 80s and the 90s. That world is gone. You know, like the world that I started in may as well have been 1750. It was closer to that than what we do today.

Marc Bernstein:

In your business.

Paul Downs:

You can say that because they were building tables back then like you're building them today, I guess, right. Well, not quite, I understand but, not that much different. Not that much different, no Right right, right.

Marc Bernstein:

So was Larry in the business with you all the way until he passed away.

Paul Downs:

He was in the business until 2010. With you all the way until he passed away. He was in the business till 2010. And at that point we had some disagreements about how to move forward, because the business was not doing well and he had invested a fair amount in it and lost it all. Basically, um, fortunately, I was able to get some help from my father and brother. They bought him out and so now my brother is my partner. He's a minority partner and, with the help of Vistage and the New York Times readership and just all of a sudden like starting to look outside the company for ideas about how to be a boss and how to build a company culture I was able to implement a lot of these things that I knew nothing about when I started, and we're in a pretty good position today.

Marc Bernstein:

Well, that is actually a great opportunity to take a quick break, commercial break, and thanks for sharing your story, Paul, but we've got a lot more questions to ask you right after the break.

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Marc Bernstein:

We are back on Founders Forum. Jess, I know you have a question for Paul.

Jess Hallahan:

Yeah, of course. So you mentioned 2008, right, the recession. Then we also had another one, you know, an issue with COVID, the pandemic. How did that affect the business?

Paul Downs:

Well, that was surprisingly not a huge problem for us. When I first realized in March of 2020 that COVID was a thing and that everybody was going to go home, I was like, well, that's that who's going to want a conference table? And it turned out to that in the short term in the spring of 2020, we had been on our way to having our best year ever, and quite a bit of our business comes from all over the country. We're not just a liberal northeast bubble kind of company. So, to my surprise most of my clients, they were just like we don't care, we don't even believe in COVID, and so I mean literally, and so we never really had to shut down for any extended period. We shut down for three weeks.

Paul Downs:

And in Pennsylvania, there was this guidance given that if you were a furniture factory, you were supposed to shut down, but if you were a wood products factory, you were supposed to stay open. And I'm like, well, if you're going to leave it up to me to make the decision, and I've got all these people all over the country like where's my table? We're going to stay open. So we did stay open. Like, where's my table? We're going to stay open. So we did stay open and we were given quite a bit of money from the government in PPP and EIDL loans, and so with that influx of cash it allowed me to retire all the debt that I'd amassed in all those decades before then when we?

Paul Downs:

weren't particularly profitable and we were able to get through the year without having to do any layoffs or any, and the next year we had a great year, and so I would not want to go through a recession again, but I did not mind having the government actually do the right thing and keep the economy going. So a happy pandemic story.

Marc Bernstein:

I love to hear that.

Paul Downs:

Well, the other thing that was surprising was that the market for conference tables did not disappear at all. It's actually grown quite a bit.

Marc Bernstein:

And it may be interesting With all the remote work, you would think that might change a little.

Paul Downs:

You would, but we saw that a lot of people want a different kind of table, one that's more suited towards video conferencing. We also saw some of our traditional market of the Northeast hedge fund banking. What have you slowed way down? But that local government and military work and sort of red states. They were thriving and so our business has been expanding ever since.

Marc Bernstein:

By the way, you have a couple kind of famous tables, don't you? Or at least tables in famous conference rooms.

Paul Downs:

We do, and one of the interesting things about being in the conference room business is that everybody needs a conference table and so we deal with a huge variety of different people and that just keeps it interesting. So from a small company out in the middle of Kansas or something all the way up to we've done tables for the Federal Reserve Bank and I've been in the senior leadership rooms at the NSA, at the Pentagon, we did two Joint Chiefs of Staff boardrooms. I was just at the headquarters of SEAL Team 6 a couple of days ago and yeah, I mean I'm in rooms that once we're done with it, you know like nobody normal ever goes in there again. Literally war rooms. Yeah.

Marc Bernstein:

Or leadership rooms.

Paul Downs:

It's a surprisingly interesting business, because you never know who you're going to deal with and the product itself has to be tailored to all these different situations, and so it keeps us, as a company, focused in touch with pretty much whatever is happening in the wider economy, because people want our product when they're in the process of expanding their facility or moving, and so we sort of see which sectors of the economy are feeling flush at any given moment and which are not, and so a couple of years ago it was a lot of health care and now it's a lot of defense, and you know, it just comes and goes, depending on what parts of the economy are doing better.

Marc Bernstein:

So I mentioned before a happy pandemic story. A lot of stories actually are happy because of resilience that people had to use and reinventing themselves and things like that. You fortunately didn't have to do that, which is kind of nice, but you paid the price early on.

Paul Downs:

I did, but you know, like my sister who ran a restaurant in Boston for 28 years, it just killed it. There was no coming back from the pandemic.

Announcer:

So a lot of my story has been luck, honestly the Google thing.

Paul Downs:

My partner was actually a stroke of luck. Yeah, it didn't go great, but he brought a lot to the business that I never would have been able to accomplish and that was a big stepping stone for us getting to where we are today. And then other pieces of luck are just the people who work for me, woodworking not being one of the sexier segments of the economy, we just attract ordinary people. But they're all good craftsmen, they're dedicated to doing really good work and getting along with each other, and it's a pleasure to run a company with such a wonderful group of employees.

Jess Hallahan:

Off-air you kind of mentioned with your employees following that segment is that you said a lot of them are on the younger side, under 25. Why do you feel that you have such a range of younger crowd and employees?

Paul Downs:

Well, I've made a conscious effort to attract them because the industry as a whole woodworking industry is probably the average age is in the upper 50s, and when I go to shops many of the shops, particularly my competitors I see nothing but gray hair on the shop floor, which is good for us because 10 years from now we're going to be the only one standing. But it wouldn't help me if I couldn't attract the next generation of craftsmen and create an atmosphere where people who want to do something but all of the ordinary venues that you used to have shop classes you used to have somebody down the street who was handy a lot of those disappearing. So we have to attract people and then commit to training them, and so that's how we've succeeded in making our workforce attractive, by offering, first of all, when you walk in you don't just see 60-year-old people, and then we make sure that our company culture is up to date, that there's no hazing, there's none of these sort of old-style craft shop floor nonsense that would be quite off-putting to today's workers.

Marc Bernstein:

Did that happen originally by accident that you discovered that, or was that?

Paul Downs:

intentional from the beginning? No, I could see it coming. I could absolutely see it coming.

Marc Bernstein:

So this is why, when you talked about I want to give you credit where you're not giving yourself credit. Luck, you know there's that expression that you work real hard and then you get lucky. You know kind of it's not exact words, I'm trying to think how it is often said, but I mean, you did go through a period in the Great Recession where you almost ran out of money, right. So there's been resilience throughout and I think that caused you to think about just having heard your story a couple times. Now. You know how do we stay current, how do we look forward, how do we make this, you know, a legacy business. I don't know if that's your goal or not, but in essence, you've been able to build it to that.

Paul Downs:

Yeah, I mean I'm 62, so obviously I have to figure out now what's going to happen when I'm not around, because it's not going to be that long, and so I'm trying to position the company to be in a position to be a sellable asset, but also one where it's clear to whoever comes in to buy it that the way we operate is actually the best way to operate, because I could, and with the people, that you, with the people treating them the way we do, that that is going to produce consistent profits and give you a stable workforce and give you the ability to grow the business by attracting the people. You need to do it, because there's no way that robots are ever going to make our product. It cannot happen and so we need to attract people.

Marc Bernstein:

Well, you know, in my business as a financial planner for entrepreneurs, I spend a lot of my being in my 60s myself and many of my clients in 50s and 60s and sometimes 70s. You know they're thinking about their legacy and often the extra strategy is to sell. Sometimes it's to sell to the employees, sometimes it's to sell or sometimes it's to continue it. Our last guest that we had last week, which was actually recorded this morning, his goal is to always stay involved in it and his legacy is for it to go on beyond him, but to stay involved as long as he can. And so it's all over the map. But it's an interesting conversation. It's an interesting thought process to think about what happens next.

Paul Downs:

Yeah, I mean, I don't have any illusions about trying to be in this business in 20 years. I just that would be what you might call the Biden approach, too Interesting.

Marc Bernstein:

We just saw how that works out, or the Trump approach, since we're talking with non-political.

Paul Downs:

Either way, I think that everybody has a sell-by date, and if you have a fantasy that you can somehow be in control of it until the moment you're dropped into a coffin, that's not actually good for anybody, and my experience in Vistage sort of showed me examples of what happens when people hang on too long. And so I don't want to be that guy Gotcha, but I do love going to work and I love the work we do and I love my people, so I'm going to miss it and I don't know.

Marc Bernstein:

Let's talk about the shorter term for a second, because if you were looking out in three years from today, so November of 2027, and we're looking back on the last three years, paul what would have to happen for you to feel that that was a successful period in your life business-wise, professionally and personally?

Paul Downs:

Well, I'd like to never experience any of my dicey moments ever again. That's a good one and that would be success.

Marc Bernstein:

But we know that may or may not happen.

Paul Downs:

No, I think that the trajectory the company is on the clients that we're working with, it all looks pretty good Three years from now. I anticipate that I'll be sort of actively moving into a let's try to figure out what happens next when Paul Downs isn't running this company.

Marc Bernstein:

And I'm in the preparatory phase for that right now that leads to a question that I know Jess wants to ask you.

Jess Hallahan:

Yeah, what are your thoughts about your legacy?

Paul Downs:

Well, the funny thing is that we're craftsmen, so that there's one aspect of our legacy which is just, you make stuff, you do it well, you send it out into the world and it's out there. Yesterday I went down to see a client I hadn't talked to in 22 years, who had bought some stuff for me and was moving into a new office and turns out she's used it every day since then. She loves it. One of her partners turned down the big corner office because the furniture I made for him wouldn't work there, and so we're leaving a legacy of just artifacts. That's very satisfying To me.

Paul Downs:

The bigger legacy is can we build a company that's got a culture that's self-sustaining, in other words, where people are treated well and they treat each other well and it makes money? People are treated well and they treat each other well and it makes money? And someone who is maybe like a younger person, who's looking for an opportunity to run a company and build real wealth and share operate the way we're operating now, I would be very happy to say, yeah, I accomplished something, considering where I started from and where I'm exiting. Yes, we've accomplished a tremendous amount.

Marc Bernstein:

Well, that's a wonderful stepping off point for us today as we're out of time. But, paul, thanks so much for being here today. Jess thanks for being here, thank you. Thank all of you for listening and we look forward to talking to you next week on Founders Forum.

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