Buy, Build, Exit, Repeat: Buying a Small Business Lessons From Chris Edwards of Right This Way Flooring
Plenty of people daydream about buying a small business. Chris Edwards actually did it: quit his corporate job in October 2020, ran a self-funded search, and in February 2021 closed on a fifteen-year-old flooring store in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, in an industry where he had zero experience. Three and a half years later he sold it, having grown revenue about fifty percent and doubled the profit. Then, instead of coasting, he started over from scratch.
On a recent episode of Everyday Excellence with host Todd Baldwin of Everyday Media Group, Edwards, now the owner of the four-month-old Right This Way Flooring in Boulder, walked through the whole arc with unusual honesty: what buying a small business really costs emotionally, what fixed the first company, and why his second act is built on systems from day one.
His resume made the leap look logical. Edwards started his career at Zayo Group, the telecom roll-up that became the largest IPO in Colorado history, watching roughly forty acquisitions from inside the finance and investor relations teams, then spent years in Salesforce consulting. But as he tells it, nothing in corporate America prepares you for the moment the accountability becomes entirely yours.
The Deal, and What It Really Cost
The Steamboat store checked every box in his buy box: roughly three million dollars in revenue, about five hundred thousand in seller discretionary earnings, purchased for about 1.7 million dollars. Big enough to beat going back to corporate, small enough not to require a maximum SBA loan. It came with a geographic moat, an affluent community that supports local business, no big-box competitor in town, and pandemic-era tailwinds as remote workers flooded the mountains.
What the spreadsheet could not show was the weight. Signing a personal guarantee on that much debt, he says, was terrifying. And the accountability shock was bigger than the debt. In corporate life, and especially in consulting, there is a buffer between you and consequences. In a small business there is none: the installers need their checks every week, the bank needs its payment every month, and if your crew nicks a homeowner’s drywall, you personally make it right.
“There were moments where I was literally curled up in a fetal position in my room crying because I thought I’d ruined my life.” – Chris Edwards
Edwards shares the dark moments deliberately, including nearly missing his daughter’s first birthday party because he was convinced the walls were caving in. His point is not to scare people off. It is that ownership was simultaneously the hardest thing he has ever done and, aside from family, the most fulfilling, and anyone considering the jump deserves to hear both halves. His advice for the aspiring: read the foundational books like The E-Myth, and understand that being a good technician does not make someone a good business owner. Ownership demands at least an elementary grasp of finance, accounting, marketing, lead generation, lead conversion, management, and leadership, and ignoring any one of them makes everything harder. He still wakes up at three in the morning sometimes. He goes to work anyway.
What Actually Doubled the Profit
The company Edwards bought ran on adrenaline. The culture was negative, every job was a fire drill, and the operating assumption was that hair-on-fire was what working hard looked like. His fix was almost boring: stop, define the actual process for everything the company does, and make each step better.
The results were not boring. Systems made the company dramatically more efficient, cutting operating expenses while the top line grew about fifty percent, which is how profit doubled on only moderate revenue growth. The people side was harder: eventually, staff turnover from the acquired team hit one hundred percent, some sooner and some later, as the company culture was rebuilt person by person.
That experience wrote the playbook for company number two. Right This Way Flooring opened with five core values under the acronym SHARP: Systems driven, Hospitable, Adaptable, Responsible, Positive. There is literally a flow chart for how the company does a carpet job, because in Edwards’ view, most flooring stores, and most small businesses, run as a free-for-all, and the operator who shows up with real systems starts with an advantage.
Why Flooring, Again
Between companies, Edwards took real time off: consulting for flooring businesses around the country, welcoming his second daughter, and finally enjoying the snowboarding and hiking that ownership never left room for. He evaluated other industries and other deals, and the antsiness arrived on schedule. The decision that followed is one every exited owner faces: start over in something new, or compound what the first company taught him. He chose compounding. The relationships, supplier knowledge, and hard-won instincts from Steamboat were assets too expensive to abandon, so the second act stayed in flooring, built from scratch this time, with a new showroom, a new brand, and the systems installed before the first job instead of after the thousandth.
What Is Working Now: Relationships First, Rankings Rising
Four months after its ribbon cutting, Right This Way Flooring is on track for one to one and a half million dollars in year-one revenue. The North Star is unglamorous on purpose: reach consistent profitability within about six months, pay back the startup investment in about eighteen, and only then replicate. The five-year vision is three to five stores, possibly with outside capital, and eventually a return to acquisition, because the flooring industry is full of mom-and-pop stores without succession plans in a category private equity has largely overlooked.
The lead channels tell an honest startup story. By far the most profitable channel is old-fashioned relationship building: getting in front of architects, builders, general contractors, designers, property managers, and real estate agents, plus chambers and BNI groups. Flooring is a high-ticket, trust-driven purchase, and face time wins it. Behind that, the SEO investment is compounding: organic form fills and Google Business Profile leads keep growing, showroom walk-ins are steady, and in the two weeks before the recording, three to four leads arrived directly from ChatGPT and other LLMs, a channel Edwards sees as the natural payoff of the same SEO work.
“Every single lead, we tag it to a lead source. Our spend to our number of leads, our gross profit to our customer acquisition cost, I track those ratios religiously.” – Chris Edwards
The Channel He Has Not Cracked Yet
Edwards is equally candid about what is not working: paid digital. Google Ads run roughly break even, Facebook ads have not found their footing, and after letting an in-house marketer go, he is running campaigns himself while admitting it is not going well. His own diagnosis is sharper than most owners ever get: traffic is arriving, but the website is not converting it. The form fill rate is where the funnel breaks.
That diagnosis is only possible because of his tracking discipline. Unlike his first company, where leads walked in the door untraceable, every lead at Right This Way is tagged to a source, and a weekly model connects spend to leads and gross profit to customer acquisition cost. He knows exactly which channel earns the next dollar, and exactly where the leak is. Most owners three years in cannot say that. He can say it at month four.
The Lesson: Traffic Is Not the Problem, Conversion Is
Edwards’ situation is the most common one in home service marketing, made unusually visible by his own data: the organic foundation is working, the AI channels are emerging from it, and paid traffic arrives at a website that does not convert it. As Todd Baldwin noted on the episode, this is exactly why conversion rate optimization matters as much as rankings, and why websites now need to be answer-first, built around the long, specific questions people ask ChatGPT and the LLMs rather than two-word searches. AI platforms recommend trusted, well-reviewed local companies that answer real questions, and Edwards’ early LLM leads show the flywheel starting to turn.
Connecting those pieces, an SEO foundation, an answer-first site that converts, paid campaigns tuned by closed-revenue data, and tracking that ties every lead to profit, is precisely the work the team at Everyday Media Group does for home service businesses. Edwards has already built the rarest part himself, the measurement discipline. The owners who pair that discipline with a site and strategy built to convert are the ones whose year-one stores become year-five store number five.
Key Takeaways From Chris Edwards
- Systems are the multiplier. Defining the process for everything, down to a flow chart for a carpet job, cut costs enough to double profit on fifty percent revenue growth, and became the founding DNA of company number two.
- Go in with eyes wide open. Ownership brought fetal-position moments and 3 AM wake-ups alongside the most fulfilling work of his life. Read E-Myth, respect the debt, and know that a good technician is not automatically a good business owner.
- Track every lead to profit. Tagging every lead to a source and reviewing spend-to-lead and profit-to-CAC ratios weekly told him precisely where his funnel breaks: the form fill rate, not the traffic.
About Chris Edwards
Chris Edwards is the owner of Right This Way Flooring, a full-service flooring store and installation company in Boulder, Colorado, serving retail, commercial, and multifamily customers. A veteran of Zayo Group’s finance team and years of Salesforce consulting, he previously bought, grew, and sold a Steamboat Springs flooring store in three and a half years. Learn more at rtwflooring.com.
Ready to Fix the Part of the Funnel That’s Actually Broken?
Everyday Media Group helps home service and trade businesses turn traffic into revenue with conversion-focused websites, SEO, answer-first content for AI search, and paid campaigns managed against closed-job data. Hosted by Todd Baldwin, the Everyday Excellence podcast features real conversations with the owners behind growing home service companies. Schedule a free consultation or connect with Todd Baldwin on LinkedIn.
