Steve Rusing and the art of getting out of the way

Steve Rusing arrived at Mattress Firm with three decades of experience and a request for an education. He knew the brands, the retailers and the business of getting a mattress onto a showroom floor. In March 2025, as he prepared to become the chain’s president, he said he wanted his first 90 days to be spent understanding the company. The executive coming through the door was allowing for the possibility that the people already inside knew something he needed to learn.

A year later, an investor asked whether Rusing had spent his supplier years imagining what he would do if he ever ran Mattress Firm. It was a reasonable question. For a sales executive, a major retail customer must offer plenty of opportunities for unsolicited mental renovation. Rusing’s answer was less theatrical: “I never really thought I would be the CEO of Mattress Firm.”

What emerged from listening was an initiative with an unusually useful name: Clear the Path. District managers and regional vice presidents needed time in stores, working with salespeople. Rusing described protecting Tuesday through Friday from corporate meetings and deadlines so they could do that work. There is a certain comedy in a large organization having to schedule freedom from its own schedule. There is also a practical idea: management can improve a store by reducing the demands it places on the people running it.

A new computer, a different side of the counter

The change in Rusing’s working life had a wonderfully mundane prop: a computer. At the end of his Tempur Sealy tenure, he would hand back his corporate equipment. At Mattress Firm, he would receive another set. A career spent helping retailers sell a manufacturer’s products was becoming a job running the retailer itself. The laptop exchange made that change rather more tangible than a new line on a biography.

His appointment as president took effect on March 10, 2025. Tempur Sealy’s acquisition of Mattress Firm had closed the previous month, and the parent was now called Somnigroup International. Scott Thompson, the parent company’s chairman, president and CEO, was also Mattress Firm’s interim CEO. Rusing initially reported to Thompson, with the retailer’s executive leadership team reporting to him.

The company emphasized separate business units. Rusing, discussing the transition, emphasized the practical boundaries between his old employment and his new one. That distinction mattered because the organizations had different responsibilities, even under one corporate roof. A supplier serves retail partners. A retailer chooses an assortment for shoppers. Ownership can bring those activities closer together; it does not make their interests identical.

Houston became the base for his new role. The move changed his vantage point as much as his address. After years of approaching the store through its relationship with the manufacturer, he now had responsibility for what happened across the retail business. The questions extended beyond whether a particular brand sold well to whether the entire shopping experience worked.

The long apprenticeship in other people’s stores

Rusing joined Sealy in June 1992, beginning in account management. By 1996 he was a district sales manager. A contemporary account of his rise described work expanding independent and regional accounts in the Northeast, including New York, Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts. Before national responsibilities came the smaller map: individual markets, local relationships and retailers with businesses of their own to protect.

His responsibilities expanded to the Western region, then to national accounts. The progression carried him through different scales of the same commercial relationship. A district needs attention to its particular retailers. A region adds distance and coordination. National accounts add the challenge of making decisions work across a much larger network. His career advanced through those layers over years.

In 2008 he became senior vice president of national accounts at Sealy. He continued in that role at Tempur Sealy after the combination in 2013. By 2016, his remit included the entire U.S. sales effort. Rick Anderson, then president of Tempur Sealy North America, described Rusing’s expanded job in terms of customer programs and working with retailers on sales and profitability.

The description is useful because it places the customer relationship at the center of the job. The manufacturer could design and produce the merchandise, but retailers still had to explain it, display it and persuade someone to buy it. Rusing’s experience accumulated at that junction. In January 2020, he became executive vice president and president of U.S. sales. His eventual move to Mattress Firm put him in charge of the other side of a relationship he had spent decades managing.

A salesman who wanted the advertising to keep running

Rusing’s public discussions of selling often return to the work that happens before a customer reaches the store. In a 2022 conversation with interviewer Dave Perry, he argued that retailers needed to keep investing in advertising as trading conditions returned to more familiar patterns. Promotional peaks, quieter periods and seasonality were coming back into view. Waiting for demand to arrive was an expensive habit.

He talked about product, too: Sealy Naturals used latex and wool, with a cover blending organic cotton and hemp. Yet he moved readily from the materials inside the mattress to the effort required to sell it. An interesting product still needed a customer’s attention. Advertising was part of the route between the two.

By August 2025, speaking as Mattress Firm’s president, he was again discussing demand creation and advertising earlier in the purchase process. The continuity is striking. His employer and responsibilities had changed, but the commercial question remained recognizable: how do you get someone interested before they are standing beside a price ticket?

That question also helps explain why his supplier experience was relevant to retail leadership. Brands and stores both need people to shop. They also have to decide how much to invest in reaching people who are still considering a purchase, rather than concentrating every effort on those already searching. Rusing had been discussing that allocation of attention well before he received the retailer’s computer.

“The fundamentals of blocking and tackling in demand creation.”

Steve Rusing · 2022 conversation with Dave Perry

The supplier becomes a competitor

The promotion came with a social complication. Retailers who had dealt with Rusing as a supplier now watched him lead a chain competing for their customers. Manufacturers, meanwhile, watched what a retailer owned by a major manufacturer would put on its floor. Familiarity could help him understand those concerns. It could hardly make them disappear.

The company’s stated position was that Mattress Firm would remain a retailer with multiple vendors. That made assortment a particularly revealing part of the job. A shopper sees products and prices. A supplier sees placement and opportunity. A parent company sees its investment. All three perspectives meet in the same showroom, where a decision about display space can carry more meaning than its square footage suggests.

On August 14, 2025, Rusing added CEO to his president title. The announcement followed five months in the president’s job. Thompson credited sharper operational focus and described the combined role as a way to align responsibilities across the business. It gave Rusing formal command of a transition that the rest of the industry was already following closely.

Making room for the people doing the selling

By the March 2026 investor presentation, his agenda had become more concrete. Mattress Firm outlined changes to merchandise, inventory planning, store presentation and sales tools. It described a $150 million program to refresh selected stores by 2027, alongside training and digital capabilities. These were company plans and investments, with the work of carrying them out still central to the story.

The Clear the Path explanation was more revealing of Rusing’s approach than the capital figure. He described a field organization distracted by demands from other departments and from the sales organization itself. Protecting time in stores addressed something an executive could change directly: the amount of internal activity competing with the selling floor.

It is easy to recognize the appeal. A store visit has limited value if the visitor is simultaneously answering a procession of corporate requests. Giving district and regional leaders time with their teams makes the promise of coaching more plausible. The intervention also puts a responsibility on headquarters: decide which requests are valuable enough to interrupt the work.

There was an earlier glimpse of that listening style in a colleague’s account of interviewing him for a corporate all-hands meeting. Beth Olsen Garcia described his clarity, humility and willingness to learn. Her description belongs to a colleague’s experience, rather than a claim to know his private character. Alongside his public explanation of the field initiative, it gives the account of his arrival a recognizable consistency.

A place for the people who came before

Rusing’s industry relationships extend beyond the sales organization. In February 2024, he was elected president of the American Home Furnishings Hall of Fame Foundation’s board. The role connected him with furniture manufacturers, retailers and an institution concerned with preserving their stories. For an executive whose career can be followed through a succession of sales territories, it is a fitting additional responsibility: helping an industry remember the people behind its companies.

Later that year, inviting nominations for the next class of inductees, he encouraged members to think about colleagues whose contributions had changed the industry. The invitation made recognition a task for the people who had seen the work. A Hall of Fame requires a ceremony, certainly, but first someone has to remember who deserves to be in the room.

An earlier photograph places Rusing in a different kind of industry gathering. In October 2019, he stood with BedMart and logistics partners at a donation of 78 Tempur-Pedic mattresses to YWCA O‘ahu. He was one participant in a group effort, identified at the time as Tempur Sealy’s senior vice president of sales. The picture offers a small, concrete view of the network behind a product: retailer, manufacturer, transportation partners and recipient.

Those connections now sit behind a much larger operating responsibility in Houston. Rusing’s route to Mattress Firm ran through accounts, territories, national sales and years of negotiating the manufacturer-retailer relationship. His first year at the retailer added a practical answer to what all that experience might produce. Sometimes the useful executive decision is to protect four days on a colleague’s calendar, then let that colleague get back to the store.