Every Flooring RVA invoice, Robert Fletcher says, goes out with a short PDF attached. It spells out what the installation warranty covers. It also gives care and cleaning instructions and lists what the homeowner has to do to keep the coverage intact.
Fletcher owns the store on West Broad Street in Henrico. He says his Virginia contractor license requires a one-year labor warranty on anything the company installs. “I move that to a two-year workmanship warranty because I believe the customer deserves the peace of mind when they choose us,” he says. He and his staff walk clients through it, he says, so they know the floor will be installed properly.
Flooring RVA sells the floor and sends the crew that lays it. In the early years Fletcher earned his Class A contractor license so the business could contract its own labor. The store now lists about 12 installation crews, and its own pages describe the two-year coverage as applying to qualifying projects.
He is just as particular about what goes down. Lower-end flooring, he says, is hard to put together and hard to work with no matter how good the installers are, and the finished job suffers for it. He carries product he describes as quality milled and green label certified. He points to the old 80-20 rule: in his view, 80 percent of the problems come from 20 percent of the products.
Most of that product goes into houses people already live in. “Our sweet spot is residential replacement,” he says, meaning homeowners who want to update. He puts residential at about 80 percent of the work. The rest is what he calls Main Street commercial: dentist offices, veterinary clinics, a Dominion Virginia Power building. He is not scared of commercial jobs, he says. He just won’t take on something like a hotel.
Fletcher came up from the carpet. The biography he posts on the store’s site says he left school early, earned a GED and cleaned carpets for two years before moving into flooring and carpet sales, where he was promoted into management in his first year. He says he spent 10 to 12 years with a larger outfit and “bounced around a little” before opening Flooring RVA in 2015.
Manufacturers, he says, want a dealer to have a brick-and-mortar store before they will open an account and sell direct. So he rented a 1,200-square-foot showroom and saw customers by appointment only, “kind of a one-man band.” Materials shipped to an off-site warehouse, and each morning he stopped there to load out the installation crews.
From there he moved into a leased 3,200-square-foot building that served as warehouse and showroom. A year and a half to two years later, a building on Broad Street came available, and he bought it. The showroom there runs 11,000 square feet.
The staff is still lean. A project manager handles scheduling and receives materials. Fletcher’s brother helps with deliveries, alongside a second warehouse hand. In the showroom it is Fletcher and three salespeople, with no managers between them. He is out front every day, he says, and anyone with a question can walk straight up to him. “I might be standing next to you, eating a sandwich or something like that, and you can just get the answer right there,” he says.