Best Practices: Tricounty Flooring America and the Floor Trader of Fresno – March 2025

By Jessica Chevalier

Mike Toste launched a retail flooring business believing that his natural talent in sales would lead to success. He soon found that running a business requires more and set out to develop systems that enabled his business to succeed-with or without his presence. Having now successfully replicated those systems across four locations, Toste has his sights set on future expansion.

FOLLOWING TWO PATHS
After graduating high school, Toste, then 18, prepared for a career in law enforcement. While in police school, he was mowing grass at a golf course to make ends meet when a friend’s father who managed a flooring store approached him with an offer he couldn’t resist: an $800/month draw toward commission.

Having grown up of humble means, Toste was excited by the possibility of making more money than he was by mowing grass. And, once on the salesfloor, he found that he had a knack for sales and was highly successful in the role.

At 20, Toste began working as a police officer and really enjoyed the adrenaline aspects of the job. For years, he worked in both fields: selling flooring during the day and working as a reserve officer from 6:00 p.m. to midnight. The positions complemented one another well, as policing offered a steady income and benefits, while flooring offered high economic potential, though less stability due to the ups and downs of retail.

In 2005, however, Toste suffered an injury in the line of duty. Amid a chase, his foot was crushed when a car t-boned his cruiser, and that necessitated a medical retirement.

Toste recalls, “I was really good at selling flooring, and I was young and naïve enough to think that if I was a good salesman I would be a good business owner. The flooring store I’d worked for was getting ready to close its doors, so I decided to build a business myself from the ground up.”

Toste found a 2,000-square-foot storefront in a strip mall in Atwater, California between a bar and a laundromat and began buying used display racks from flooring retailers that were upgrading. He blocked off part of the space to serve as a warehouse, large enough to fit only three rolls of carpet and a forklift.

Toste told his friend, Robert Anderson, that he was opening a store, and the friend asked, “Do you want me to come help?” That friend is still with him today-now the head of sales at the Atwater store.

The store slowly diversified into additional flooring products and brands and, in its first year, sold $600,000 worth of flooring. “Then it started to catch momentum,” recalls Toste.

HONING THE OPERATION
While Toste’s business was growing, it still wasn’t profitable, and that propelled Toste to consider his approach. “I read business books and moved into a franchise prototype focused on three elements: people, product and process,” says Toste. “We really honed the process-marketing, lead generation, closing, installation, happy customers, repeat business. I built the system so that I didn’t need to be involved in the day-to-day for them to operate.”

In 2009, Toste decided to join Flooring America, and that further sharpened his operations. Then he honed his systems and processes for a few more years before cutting the ribbon on a second Flooring America store in Turlock, about 20 minutes away.

A third Flooring America location, in Modesto, was opened in March 2020-one week before the mandatory Covid shutdown. But the company was able to survive even that hurdle. “We went from thinking ‘Are we going out of business? We have bills but no revenue,’ to having the best two years the industry has ever seen,” Toste recalls.

Each of Toste’s Flooring America showrooms are 4,500 to 5,000 square feet. The company has an off-site distribution center that serves all three locations.

Then, just last month, Toste opened his first Floor Trader operation, located in Fresno, which is about an hour and a half away from the Atwater home base. “I was intrigued by the Floor Trader business model but wanted to go into a bigger market with it. In addition, I didn’t want to be competing with myself,” says Toste.

When Toste launched his first flooring store, his ultimate goal was to have five locations, like the flooring company he had previously worked for. “I have one more to go before I meet that goal, then I will probably change it,” he laughs.

EXPANDING OPPORTUNITIES
Toste reports that he pursued property management accounts heavily starting out, focused on building relationships and moving product. That business is something of a double-edged sword, however. “It’s like selling cheeseburgers: the margin is lower, but you do more volume and have repeat business,” says Toste. “It keeps the installers busy and maximizes product, but you have to buy better to make a good margin.”

The company also does a good amount of mainstreet commercial work as well as some larger commercial projects. Recently, it completed a job at an 11-story building that took 18 months in total. It also does a good amount of education work. “We try to take advantage of every opportunity we can,” says Toste.

The company has also dabbled in expanding its product offering but found that it would rather focus on its area of expertise.

THE TEAM
Most of Toste’s hires have flooring experience when he brings them on. “We train them from the ground up in our process,” he notes. In new hires, Toste is looking for trustworthiness and customer service skills.

“When I did the training, I wanted everyone to do the job the way I was doing it,” recalls Toste. “Of course, some of my ways rubbed off on them, but they also developed their own styles that work for them.”

Technology, Toste reports, makes training much easier, especially when it comes to tasks such as measuring and building estimates.

While Toste has a great staff, he finds the limited talent pool to be a challenge. “We want to continue to grow, so, right now, our greatest challenge is trying to find the right people to do that,” he reports. “We have opportunities for growth but don’t have the manpower. We are hiring and training as fast as we can, but it takes a year or two for people to really become fully trained.”

On the labor front, Toste has taken a proactive approach to standing out from the competition. He says, “Some guys will try to pay installers the least they can to maximize their profit. I pay them more than others to incentivize them to come work for me. In addition, we offer installers a clean process; we make sure the customer, material and jobsite are ready, so that they can get right to work. And we pay out installers weekly, regardless of whether we have been paid. We have found that if you treat installers right, they will want to work for you.”

THE RIGHT MOVES
Toste believes that his business’ success is the systems he has set up, enabling the operations to work efficiently, even in his absence, which, he believes, is key “for any business that isn’t about what you sell but how you get it to the end user.” And, in that, having great people is crucial.

He also believes it’s critical to have a good range of products in different price points; stay abreast of trends; and determine what’s selling well, buy that in bulk and pass those savings on to the consumer.

What’s more, Toste is highly committed to standing behind his work: “During the vinyl plank debacle, between 2021 and 2023, when tiles were blowing off the floor, we replaced every single one. We didn’t want an upset customer or to get bad reviews. Our customers spent a lot of money on those floors, and they failed.”

Copyright 2025 Floor Focus

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