The next heartbeat – that’s how Ray Anderson, founder and chairman of Interface, Inc., described our customers, the lifeblood of our company. That realization came early on for Ray. Shortly after the company’s start-up in 1973, he looked around to see a factory where there had once been 13 acres of pine trees, to see tufting machines, a familiar site for a textiles guy, and a cutting line – a technology that was not so familiar. Modular carpet was a new idea, one that Ray thought was, “so right, and so very smart.” He couldn’t convince his then employer, a competing carpet company, to invest in this new technology, but he knew it was a brilliant solution to the then-emerging office of the future – the modern office, where cables that would power desktop technology would need a place to be routed and hidden. When he looked around at this new enterprise in 1973 and then looked at his order book, he realized, the customer is the next heartbeat.

It would turn out that taking that giant, entrepreneurial leap in 1973 would not be the last time that Ray Anderson would rely on his intellect, his deep understanding of his market, and sheer instinct to look around the next corner and see the future. It also wouldn’t be the last time that he’d be influenced by that next heartbeat, the customer. He did it again in 1994, when he looked to the future and saw the end of business as usual. When he saw not just the challenges that would be presented by climate change and dwindling natural resources, but also the opportunity for a company that would pioneer the technologies of the low carbon economy. And he was motivated to see this future long before “green” entered the corporate lexicon, all because a customer asked, “What is Interface doing for the environment?”

That story is now legend, that spear-in-the-chest epiphany Ray experienced when he thought about that question in the context of his petroleum-dependent company’s impact, on the earth, and when he imagined that impact multiplied many times over by modern industry.

It is for the last 17 years of his life – the years he spent telling the story of his personal transformation, and that of our company – that Ray will be best remembered, and for good reason. But for those of us at Interface, Ray’s legacy is not just about his sustainability epiphany, it is about his entrepreneurial streak, his courage to look around the next bend, and his constant connection to you, the next heartbeat.