George CollierFloor Authority installs flooring in new-build homes across South Carolina, for national builders including DR Horton, Lennar and PY Homes. It turns over $24M a year, and every quote, order, invoice and report runs through one system built around how the business works.
Annual revenue running on their software
Growth, with only a few new hires
Staff productivity
Saved a year on off-the-shelf software
Software built for the masses
Before that system, Floor Authority went through two off-the-shelf business systems. The first was, in RT's words, “very dated looking and feeling”. The second was more modern, but “it just didn't work well for us at all.”
The problem was flooring itself. Products are sold by the box, the square yard and the linear foot, and carpet “comes 12 feet wide”, so working out what to order for a house isn't simple maths. Generic software couldn't handle quantities like that, so the team worked around it by hand. As RT puts it, off-the-shelf software “is built for the masses”.
Building their own
So RT built the system himself. He wasn't a developer, but he learned a no-code tool, and by January 2022 the whole business ran on it.
That fixed the fit, and created a new problem. Every change and every fix depended on RT, and he reckoned keeping up with it would have taken 100% of his time. That's a lot to ask of the person running a $24M company.
Handing it over
RT brought in Not Quite Unicorns to run and develop the software, so he could get back to running the business. He tells us what he needs, and we design, build, test and release it. Plenty of requests are live within a day.
“I create a request and within a couple of days, I have a new feature. It amazes me how well they understand what I want created, and the result has been far better than anything I could do on my own.”
What the business runs on
Today, the system handles:
- Sales pipelines for retail, custom new-build, commercial and wholesale work
- Quotes from a catalogue of more than 20,000 products, in the units flooring is actually sold in
- Inventory and purchase orders
- Accounting, including profit and loss and balance sheets
- One customer database the whole team works from
The results
Because the software does admin the team used to do by hand, the business has more than doubled without hiring at the same rate. Staff productivity is up at least 25%, and the company saves more than $24,000 a year compared with off-the-shelf systems. RT's verdict on what it's worth: “it's honestly priceless.”
What's next
We're now building team communication and task management into the system, so less work lives in email and spreadsheets. RT has even considered offering it to other flooring companies one day. For now, the focus is on growing Floor Authority: “We've got our sight set on $100 million.”
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