HIGH POINT — The Future Leaders Award given by the American Home Furnishings Hall of Fame Foundation has been renamed the Paul Broyhill Future Leaders Award, underwritten by a gift from the Broyhill Family Foundation.
In a release, Hall of Fame CEO Karen McNeill Pond said the award “will be named after one of the industry’s leading families and a company that under his leadership focused on executive training and perhaps produced more leaders for our industry than any other single company.”
“The standards set by the Broyhill family through three generations — James Edgar Broyhill, Paul Hunt Broyhill and now his son, M. Hunt Broyhill — will forever be preserved as giants that greatly influenced our industry,” she added. J.E. Broyhill and his son, Paul Broyhill, were inducted separately into the Hall of Fame for their contributions to the industry. The elder Broyhill was born into a farming family in 1892. After serving in the US Army, he worked with his brother in the logging industry, then bought a struggling furniture operation in 1926. Despite the Great Depression, J.E. grew the company to more than 1,000 employees.
His son, Paul, was just two years old when his father started the business. From an early age, he worked in the plants and in the office. After a stint in the U.S. Army and graduating from UNC-Chapel Hill, he worked alongside his father, ultimately becoming CEO. Paul and his brother-in-law, Bill Stevens, company vice-president, developed “Broyhill U,” an internal sales training and management program.
“A marketing genius and an innovator, Paul made Broyhill Furniture a household name,” the Hall of Fame noted. Under his lead, Broyhill grew to 6 million square feet of manufacturing space and employed more than 7,000 workers. He was one of the first to offer an employee pension plan. “Rather than just building plants, I like to think I built people,” Paul Broyhill says.
“Because of his tremendous innovations and leadership initiatives, the creation of the Paul Broyhill Future Leaders Award will be a reminder of the impressive impact that the Broyhill family has had on the development of leaders in our industry,” McNeill Pond said.
The award will be given annually to five emerging leaders selected on a points-based evaluation of the candidate’s leadership, potential for personal growth, communications skills, and commitment to the industry. Recipients will receive a framed Certificate of Achievement signed by Hunt Broyhill, the published “Oral History of Paul Hunt Broyhill,” and an invitation to dinner with five other Future Leaders and five inducted members of the Hall of Fame. They also will be made members of the Hall of Fame’s Leaders Circle.