How We Made the Transition from Contracting-Only to Retail

As a contracting business, we never expected to get into retail. But after moving to a new town and seeing the need, we decided to take the leap.
As a contracting business, we never expected to get into retail. But after moving to a new town and seeing the need, we decided to take the leap.

After working as contractors for 20 years and running our own floor contracting business for five, we decided to open our first storefront earlier this year. We had the idea after moving from a big city to a small town and realizing there wasn’t a dedicated flooring retailer nearby—the retail options were either a big box chain or a nearly two-hour drive. There were a lot of unknowns when we transitioned to retailing, but it’s so far turned out to be one of the best decisions we’ve made. Here are some of the challenges we faced opening our store, why we felt it was the right move for us, and things to consider if you’re wondering whether you should take the leap, as well.

The first thing we did was run the idea of opening a storefront past friends and customers who lived and worked in this town. We got only positive feedback, and that was a good push. The next step was researching how easy it was to work with different vendors, shipping, and all those logistics. We knew we wanted to finance everything ourselves because we didn’t want to be tied to big loans or massive monthly payments, so we aimed small. We’re kind of taught that if we want to start a business, we have to go all in and get a huge business loan to have everything set up and perfect, but that’s not true.

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