Headquarters: Minneapolis

Inception: 2012

Family name: Harris

What the company does: Distributor of office interior furnishings; also supplies design services

Type of ownership: S corp.

Principal owner: Rick Harris

Employees: 7

Family members in the business: 4

Family members on the board: No board

Rick Harris had built a solid business in the California Bay Area. Then he and his family moved to Minneapolis.

“We had had no thoughts of coming to Minnesota at all,” says Harris, who had been in the office interiors business for nearly 30 years when his wife, Donna Harris, was recruited to become president of Minnehaha Academy in Minneapolis in 2009. An assistant superintendent at a large school in San Jose, her advanced degrees in education and theology made her the right fit for the private Christian school. “We’d never been to Minnesota, and with the bad winters you have, we never wanted to be,” Rick Harris notes wryly. “But it was a good opportunity for her, so we thought we’d give it a shot.”

Starting over in a new market, even with his years of experience, proved more challenging than Rick Harris expected. In California, his commercial design and furniture business focused largely on high-tech startups, which were constantly in growth mode. The Twin Cities, he found, was a more stable market, but that meant it was hard for a newcomer to break in. As a result, “we did something we’d never done before—we started working with the public sector,” he says.

These days, Ideal’s customer mix is about 50% public, 50% private, with a particular strength in the nonprofit market. Hennepin County is its biggest and longest-standing customer. Ideal’s sweet spot is “companies where we’re able to talk to the owner directly and get past the architects and designers who have their own pet products and vendors,” he says. Ideal doesn’t sell any one line, which allows the company to tailor products to an organization’s needs and budget. “With our value proposition, we can compete with anyone,” he says. It’s been working: Ideal’s revenue has grown from $1.3 million in 2019 to $2.5 million in 2023.

His early struggles and eventual success establishing Ideal in the Twin Cities market led him to co-found the Minnesota Minority Goods and Services Association, which mentors and advocates for other minority-owned businesses. “We’ve helped a lot of the major public companies understand where the gaps are when they wanted to work with minority-owned companies,” says Rick Harris, who is the association president.

He started Ideal in 2012, and two years later, his son, Tim Harris, joined the business. “I didn’t know anything about furniture,” Tim Harris recalls. After a couple of years, he left to work for a Minneapolis ad agency, but he soon found it wasn’t quite right for him.

“Some clients like to hear the entire story of Ideal and like the relational part. Other clients are direct and to the point: ‘What’s the dollar amount?’ ‘What products do we need?’ It’s a great marriage of both [my father and my] communications styles.”

—Tim Harris, vice president and director of operations, Ideal Workplace Solutions

Returning to Ideal, Tim Harris discovered that despite not having his father’s “deep product knowledge,” he could provide skills he’d learned at the agency, including marketing and client communications.

“My dad would be the first to tell you that I’m not a salesperson,” says Tim Harris, who’s now Ideal’s vice president and director of operations. He sees his strengths as organizing and “looking at things high-level. I love to be behind the scenes—planning, developing schedules, managing vendor and client relationships.”

The father and son work well together today, but it took some time. “We had to learn how each of us communicates,” Tim Harris recalls. His father adds, “I’m a face-to-face kind of person. I like to go out and talk to the customer. Tim does more emailing and messaging.”

“Some clients like to hear the entire story of Ideal and like the relational part,” Tim Harris says. “Other clients are direct and to the point: ‘What’s the dollar amount?’ ‘What products do we need?’ It’s a great marriage of both of our communications styles.”

Tim Harris notes that customer service is a huge pillar of the company. One of those customers is V3 Sports, a community-focused health, fitness, and education nonprofit in North Minneapolis. Ideal has provided furniture as well as layout design for V3’s workspaces, community areas, child care facility, and restaurant.

“They’ve helped us think through what environments we want to create a welcoming space,” V3 Sports founding director Erika Binger says.

In addition, Ideal “put on design charrettes to intentionally solicit feedback and input from users,” including young people and other residents in V3’s neighborhood.

In recent years, Tim Harris has been joined in the business by two of his sisters: Myisha Harris, who’s now Ideal’s vice president of finance and administration, and Jamie Harris, who leads the company’s marketing and social media efforts.

“I’m not sure what the company will look like 10 years from now,” Rick Harris says, noting that “Tim definitely has some ideas about things he wants to do.”

Whatever direction Ideal takes, “the key thing is how we treat people, both customers and employees.”

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