By 2025 the company was capable. The team was built, the systems worked, the brand was established. What changed was outside all of it.
A CEO controls strategy, people, execution and capital. A CEO does not control demand, competition or the economy. The hardest judgment I have made was recognizing that what was in front of me was not one more problem to solve but a condition to accept — and that continuing to push would spend value rather than build it.
I closed the operating business deliberately and transferred the brand and digital assets to ASNO Corp.
$2 million in 2022.
$4 million in 2023.
$5.3 million in 2024, running at roughly $7 million annualised at peak.
Eight to ten crews, around twenty-five installers, and six people in the office and sales including me. Roughly thirty people in total, running seven million dollars of work.
In 2022 I opened a 4,500 square foot showroom in Sunnyvale and stopped running projects.
I hired management and sales staff, split the business into service and retail divisions, wrote down responsibilities that had previously lived only in my head, and moved into larger work and the professional networks that fed it. What I kept was strategy, capital, major negotiations, partnerships, brand direction, and anything the existing processes could not handle.
$2 million in 2022.
$4 million in 2023.
$5.3 million in 2024, running at roughly $7 million annualised at peak.
Eight to ten permanent crews. Twenty-five to thirty people across operations, project management, retail, marketing and delivery.
Two things I built in this period are written up in full: how installation work became a production system, and how the showroom was connected to online pricing, visualisation and e-commerce.
I founded Elephant Floors in 2018 as a licensed California flooring contractor, with $5,000 and one installation crew. For the first three years I was the entire commercial function: I generated the leads, met the clients, measured the projects, priced them, negotiated the contracts, ordered the materials and supervised the work.
$240,000 in the first six months.
$600,000 in 2019.
$900,000 in 2020.
$1.2 million in 2021.
At peak I was personally running as many as 24 active projects in a month while producing 50 to 60 estimates and invoices. By the end of 2021 there were six crews, and I had learned the business at the level of the individual transaction — first enquiry to final delivery.
That was also the ceiling. Everything the company could produce was limited by what I could personally touch.
ELEPHANT FLOORS · FOUNDER & CEO · 2018–2026
I moved from analysing solutions to selling them. Union-member leads, direct outreach, appointments booked and met in people's homes, needs identified, products presented — start to finish, alone.
I finished as the third-highest producer in the branch, behind only the branch head and my own manager.
There is no distance in that job between the recommendation and the person deciding on it. An analysis can be technically correct and still fail because the client does not understand it, does not trust it, or cannot see why it matters. Transamerica taught me to find the right answer. American Income Life taught me that being right is not the same as being persuasive.
American Income Life · 2015–2017
The work was diagnosis under incomplete information. Clients rarely presented the actual problem. They presented the question they thought they had, and learning to tell those two apart is the most durable thing I took from the job.
TRANSAMERICA · FINANCIAL SERVICES REPRESENTATIVE · 2013–2015
I started as a flooring helper shortly after high school and worked up through installer and lead installer to foreman, eventually running two crews and two concurrent projects while still producing on site.
I was drawn to the technically difficult jobs, and to work other people treated as routine. I got into the habit of breaking a job into its parts — tools, materials, sequencing, labour — and looking for the simplest method that produced the same result every time. That habit became the basis of how I later built the company.
I worked construction through the financial services years as well, and returned to it full time afterwards with a commercial perspective I had not had before.
