Podcast: How Brandon and Ryan Workman Built United Floor Coatings on SEO, Relationships, and Floor Science
The first big commercial project in United Floor Coatings’ history almost did not happen. Brandon Workman had driven to the North Carolina coast in early January for a site visit on a hotel with exterior walkways across multiple high-rise buildings. The meeting went well. He felt good about the pricing. And then the prospect went quiet and hired the cheap local guy instead.
A few weeks later, the phone rang again. The cheap guy had gotten in and realized he was over his head. Could United Floor Coatings move on it quickly? It was theirs if they could.
They could. They did. Ryan Workman, Brandon’s brother and co-owner, had been working at a digital marketing agency at the time. He left shortly after that project and joined the business full-time. United Floor Coatings was, by that point, clearly a real company.
On a recent episode of Everyday Excellence, Todd Baldwin sat down with Brandon for a conversation covering the 10-year arc of United Floor Coatings, the SEO foundation that Ryan’s digital agency background helped them build from day one, what traditional marketing channels delivered versus what organic search and contractor relationships produced, and the three things Brandon would tell anyone starting a trade business today.
From Garages to High Rises: What United Floor Coatings Actually Does
United Floor Coatings started in May 2016 with residential epoxy work, mostly garage floors and basements around the Charlotte, North Carolina area. In the nearly 10 years since, the business has grown to include a broad range of coating systems and concrete polishing, serving both residential and commercial clients across two offices, Charlotte and Raleigh, covering most of North Carolina.
By project count, the residential side is larger. By revenue, commercial dominates. Commercial work ranges from warehouse floors and industrial facilities to highly specialized applications: electrostatic dissipative flooring to protect sensitive electronics and machinery, and anti-slip systems installed where slip-and-fall liability has become a compliance priority. The simplest framing Brandon offers is that United Floor Coatings makes concrete look better and protects the surface beneath it. The complexity goes well beyond that in practice.
Brandon takes floor maintenance seriously enough to educate clients on it directly. How to move pallets across a coated surface. Which chemicals to keep away from which systems. What happens when hydraulic oil is allowed to soak into an untreated slab over years. The protection side of the business is not an upsell: it is the case for doing the work at all before the floor has deteriorated past the point where a coating system delivers its full value.
Year One: Spreadsheets, Mixed Crews, and Figuring It Out the Hard Way
The first partial year in business produced better-than-expected results without producing anything that felt like a stable operation. Brandon and Ryan were wearing all their hats simultaneously: sales, project management, crews, ordering. The team was a mixed bag of people with and without experience in coatings. There was no proper payroll system. There were spreadsheets and craigslist hires and the constant improvisation of a business that had not yet found its footing.
The hard lessons Brandon reflects on from that period land in three categories. Do not get in over your head, a lesson absorbed partly from the coastal hotel project that pushed the company’s capacity. Hire the right people, which took painful iterations before the team stabilized. And get out in front of systems before you need them, because building process under pressure is far harder than building it in advance.
By late 2017, the Raleigh office had a physical location. By 2018, both brothers felt the company had crossed from survival mode into something more durable. The word they use is stability: not explosive growth, but a business that had found its baseline and could operate from it consistently.
What’s Working Now: SEO Bedrock, Contractor Partners, and AI Search
Ryan Workman came into the business from a digital marketing agency where he had watched a client in the coatings space take off after committing to a proper digital strategy. That observation informed how United Floor Coatings approached its own digital presence from the very beginning. Organic search was the priority. The SEO foundation was laid early and maintained consistently.
Almost 10 years later, it is still producing. “A lot of it just owes to our early focus on SEO and our organic positioning was really strong out of the gate.” More competitors have entered the residential market since then, particularly as product innovation has made coatings easier to work with and the category has attracted more operators. But the early organic investment built a depth of authority that newer entrants cannot simply replicate quickly.
Word of mouth from thousands of completed projects now runs parallel to the digital foundation. Key contractor partners, regional GCs and facility managers who reliably direct work toward United Floor Coatings, have become a structural part of the pipeline. Brandon describes the shift from early passive marketing to more intentional upstream bid work: moving from waiting for inbound leads to proactively building the relationships that create recurring project flow.
AI search is a channel they are watching carefully. United Floor Coatings is showing up in the AI-generated answer blocks that appear at the top of Google search results, a direct result of the content authority built over nearly a decade of organic investment. Ryan, described as an AI power user, is tracking the space and experimenting with tools including an AI receptionist. The full picture has not emerged yet, but the company is positioned well for whatever form AI search takes: strong organic content is the foundation that all the major AI systems draw from.
Traditional media channels, magazines, home shows, and neighborhood events have been tried and produced mixed results. Brandon is measured about it: some produced leads, none produced the ROI that justified the bandwidth required. Without a dedicated person to manage a programmatic show presence, the channel demands more than it returns. Digital has been far and away the stronger performer.
The Lesson: Know the Work, Stay in Your Lane, and Invest in Organic Early
Brandon’s advice for anyone starting a trade or service business comes in three parts. First: know what you are doing before you try to sell it. Even if the intention is to move toward the desk and focus on sales or management, an owner who cannot speak authoritatively about the work will lose deals and make costly decisions. The technical fluency Brandon developed in the early years is what made the sales conversations credible and the project judgments sound.
Second: do not get in over your head. The coastal hotel project was a stretch when it landed. But the right mentor appeared at the right moment: a family friend in the space who could work alongside the team on a project that challenged them, teaching and earning at the same time. Search your network for who might serve that mentoring role even before you know exactly who to look for. Starting those conversations usually leads to the right person eventually.
Third: stay in your lane when you have a partner. Brandon and Ryan cover different areas of the business. Ryan handles marketing and sales; Brandon covers operations. Built-in trust, a high tolerance for each other’s blind spots, and the discipline not to second-guess each other in their respective domains is what makes a family partnership sustainable. The businesses that break from partnership friction are usually the ones where the partners never established clear lanes.
The SEO lesson runs underneath all three. Ryan’s digital agency background gave United Floor Coatings a head start that competitors starting the same year without that context did not have. An early, consistent investment in organic content and local search positioning compounds over time in a way that almost no other marketing channel does. The companies showing up in organic search today are almost universally the ones that started building years ago.
At Everyday Media Group, Todd Baldwin and the team work with trade and service businesses to build the organic SEO, local content, and digital positioning that functions as the long-term foundation Brandon describes. The businesses that invest in it early get the compounding returns. The ones that wait end up competing against those who did not.
Key Takeaways
- SEO is a bedrock investment, not a campaign. United Floor Coatings built its organic foundation in 2016. It is still producing leads almost 10 years later, and it is what put them in Google’s AI-generated results without any specific optimization effort for that channel. Every year of waiting to invest in organic is a year of compounding that a competitor who started earlier is collecting.
- Know the work before you sell it. Owners who cannot speak to the technical side of their trade cannot earn trust from clients who have seen many contractors. The early hands-on years are not a cost to manage through. They are an investment in the credibility that makes every sales conversation more effective later.
- Build the contractor partner network before you need it. Regional GCs and facility managers who trust your work and think of you first on new projects are worth more per relationship than almost any digital marketing channel. United Floor Coatings’ shift toward proactive upstream bid work and contractor relationship cultivation is what moves a business from phase one survival to phase three growth.
About Brandon and Ryan Workman
Brandon Workman and Ryan Workman are co-owners of United Floor Coatings, a floor coating and concrete polishing company with offices in Charlotte and Raleigh, North Carolina. Brandon and Ryan founded the company in May 2016, starting with residential garage epoxy work and growing into commercial and industrial floor systems over nearly a decade. Ryan, who came from a digital marketing agency background, handles marketing and sales. Brandon oversees operations. The company has completed thousands of projects across both residential and commercial markets, and is approaching a full decade in business in 2026.
Find United Floor Coatings at unitedfloorcoatings.com.
Is Your Trade Business Getting the SEO Foundation It Deserves?
United Floor Coatings built its organic presence in 2016 and it is still producing leads and AI search appearances today. Everyday Media Group works with trade and service businesses to build the same kind of compounding digital foundation: local SEO, content, and Google Business Profile strategy that earns leads year over year instead of requiring constant paid spend. Schedule a conversation with Todd Baldwin and the team.
