CK Flooring’s owner spent 15 years laying floors and now sends out the crews
Colton Kinnaman laid floors for 15 years and now sells the jobs from a Louisville store while two crews of installers put them down.
Louisville, KY
A thousand square feet of hardwood might take three days to install, Colton Kinnaman says. Luxury vinyl plank is a different job.
“I can get thousand foot of plank done in one day,” he says.
Kinnaman, who owns CK Flooring in Louisville, learned that arithmetic on the floor. He did the installing himself for years before he had crews to send. “I laid floors for 15 years,” he says. “I’m really good at it. I know everything there is to know about it.”
He doesn’t lay them anymore. He takes the calls, then goes out to measure rooms and show samples. Two full-time crews of subcontracted installers put the floors down, and he calls in other installers to fill in when the schedule gets heavy. “I do all my own sales, and I deal with all the customers myself,” he says. “So I don’t physically do the labor anymore.”
That move, from the man on the floor to the man who sends the crews, is the story of CK Flooring. What he learned as an installer still decides which jobs he wants and how far he will drive for them.
Kinnaman got into flooring as another man’s helper and stayed about five years. He also put in time at one of Louisville’s long-established flooring companies. He incorporated CK Flooring in 2018, and for a while the company’s business address was his own house.
Now it works out of a store and warehouse on Bishop Lane. Customers come in to pick out flooring. Kinnaman also sells material wholesale. The store brought things he never had to manage when he worked from home, starting with a warehouse and hourly employees.
The company describes itself as family-owned and operated, and it sticks to vinyl plank, engineered hardwood and carpet. It does not take repair-only jobs. Its focus is full installation, and the company says most jobs are finished in a single day.
Kinnaman is blunt about which work he would choose. “Luxury vinyl plank is where you’re going to make the most money in flooring, and it’s not even close,” he says. The reason is speed. “You can make more money on hardwood, but the jobs take way longer.”
Carpet has changed. “Most of the time nowadays we’re not carpeting whole houses anymore,” he says. People put it in the bedrooms or on the stairs, and he would rather not drive an hour for a carpet job.
Distance is its own calculation. Ideally he stays within about 40 minutes. Twenty miles is still in range, and 40 to 45 miles is the edge. Thirty-five miles, he says, usually works out to about an hour. A big job an hour and a half away is worth the drive, but only if he is fairly sure he will get it before he goes out to look. So he asks questions first.
“I’m very upfront with people,” he says. “I try to get rough ideas on what the job is, and I shoot them ballpark numbers before I ever go.”
Most of CK Flooring’s work comes back around. Kinnaman says the majority of his jobs come from repeat customers and referrals. A restoration company in Mount Washington sends him jobs when it gets busy, and he does a lot of work for real estate investors. One landlord wrote in a Google review that Kinnaman had installed vinyl plank and carpet at seven of his rental properties and at his own home, and that Kinnaman is the first person he calls whenever a floor needs replacing.
Customers often mention speed. One homeowner wrote that the company replaced the carpet in a house of more than 5,000 square feet in a little over a day, moving the furniture out and putting it back where it had been. Another wrote that the crew had the old floor ripped up, the new one installed and the house put back together before dinner.
Other customers come after something has gone wrong. When sump pump problems caused water damage to one basement carpet, Kinnaman was upfront about the options, the homeowner wrote, and his team replaced the carpet with waterproof flooring. Another customer, replacing floors after water damage, wrote that he even put her in touch with a contractor who could help replace the back door.
And one customer moving into a new house wanted plank to match flooring that had been discontinued. Kinnaman found a comparable floor that matched the color, the customer wrote, and fit the job in before the move-in date.
Most of the work is residential, Kinnaman says, though the company takes commercial jobs, too. Its list of service areas runs from Jeffersontown and Shepherdsville to Fort Knox and Radcliff, then across the Ohio River into Indiana as far as Madison and Salem.
If he could pick the work, Kinnaman says, he would do new construction developments. The size of those jobs does not worry him. He describes himself as the kind of guy who gets the work first and figures it out after.
“I don’t think there’s going to be anything that can get laid at my feet that I can’t get figured out,” he says.