What does a flooring franchise owner do? A week in the showroom

If you're thinking about a flooring franchise, opening day is easy to picture. An ordinary week is harder.

This guide walks through what running a flooring store looks like week to week in a National Floors showroom. It describes a rhythm, not a fixed timetable: every showroom, and every week, is a little different.

The short version. The showroom trades 9am to 5pm, Monday to Saturday, and owners should expect to be on the floor six days a week, especially in their first year. You lead a team that helps customers choose, measures, quotes, follows up, orders and keeps installs on track. Across our company showrooms over the past year, about 30% of orders included installation, and the typical install happened about three weeks after the order.

What does a flooring showroom owner do day to day?

In one line: you run the floor. Our marketing, including $500K a year in national marketing plus local ads in your territory, sends customers to the showroom. Your job is to turn those enquiries and walk-ins into booked jobs, and to see each one through to a finished floor.

That makes you part salesperson, part coach and part manager: serving customers, setting the standard for your team, making sure nothing falls through the cracks and watching the numbers. You don't lay the floors yourself.

What does a typical week in a flooring showroom look like?

Measures, quotes and installs happen all week, and customers walk in on any day, but a week tends to settle into a pattern. Here's one example:

Treat it as an example, not a rule. Demand also shifts through the year: our guide to when Victorians buy new floors looks at the seasonal pattern.

How do you plan the week?

Monday usually starts with the live dashboards, which show sales and KPIs as you trade. They're the same dashboards our own showrooms use. A good planning session answers a few plain questions:

• How did last week go against the plan?
• Which quotes are still open, and who is following up each one?
• Which measures and installs are booked, and is everything ordered?
• Who on the team needs help?

Then you set the week's priorities with your team.

What happens when a customer walks in?

This is the heart of the job. Customers come in to see and feel the floors side by side: hybrid, laminate, timber, carpet and more, from 20+ suppliers including Godfrey Hirst, Preference, Karndean, Tarkett and Quest, plus exclusive ranges.

Helping someone choose is mostly listening: which rooms, who lives there, what look, what budget and by when. Then you narrow a big range down to a few good options.

Saturday is often a key day for walk-ins, so it's when you want your strongest people on the floor. The aim of a first visit is usually a booked measure.

How do measures, quotes and follow-ups work?

A measure is booked in the CRM, where every customer, quote and install sits in one place. You or someone on your team then visits the home with the field app, which lets you measure, quote and update the job on site.

Then comes the step that's easiest to let slip: following up. Customers often take time to decide. Automatic follow-ups go out so no enquiry goes cold, and the CRM shows which quotes are still open. A personal call to answer a question is still yours to make.

What happens after a customer says yes?

You place the order at national pricing, and it's drop-shipped to site. Then the juggling starts. Here's how orders looked across our three company showrooms, in Dandenong, Werribee and Thomastown, over the 12 months to October 2026:

The rest of the orders were supply only, either delivered or picked up. We worked these figures out from our sales orders and rounded them.

That shapes the week: most of this week's installs were sold weeks ago, so you always have jobs waiting on stock, waiting on a date or booked in. Timing varies from job to job, so treat these figures as a past pattern, not a promise to customers.

Installs are scheduled with installers in the job management system, and keeping customers updated is a big part of the role. If you'd rather not handle dispatch yourself, our back office can look after it, along with payables and receivables, for a small fee.

How do you handle problems and complaints?

Things go wrong in any trade business: a delivery runs late, a colour looks different at home, or an install needs a return visit. How you handle it shapes what the customer tells their friends.

You don't have to make it up as you go. Our procedures run from quoting a job to handling a complaint, with more than 10 hours of video and 100+ pages of written procedures that you keep after training.

Under the Australian Consumer Law, the business that sold a product is responsible for resolving problems with it, and it must not send the customer to the manufacturer. If the fault is the manufacturer's, the manufacturer must reimburse the business for the cost of the remedy. This is general information, not legal or financial advice.

How do you ask customers for reviews?

Reviews do a lot of quiet marketing for a local showroom. Across our Thomastown, Dandenong and Werribee showrooms, we have a 4.8 Google rating and 860 five-star reviews.

Ask when the floor is down, and ask every customer the same way. Google's review policy doesn't allow a business to selectively ask for positive reviews, offer incentives or pressure customers to review while they're on the premises. The ACCC says it's against the law for a business to create fake or misleading reviews, and that incentives for positive reviews risk breaching it. Then reply to the reviews you get, good and bad.

What does leading the team involve?

A showroom owner is a coach as much as a seller. Your team learns from how you greet a walk-in, run a measure and follow up a quote, so most weeks include some coaching: going through open quotes together, practising how to explain products, and fixing small habits early.

You don't need a flooring background. 70% of our successful managers came from other industries, and the three months of in-store training covers product, sales, operations and the money side. Leading a team also means hiring, rostering six trading days and covering when someone's sick.

How do you keep on top of the numbers?

The money side is part of every week. Because the dashboards update as you trade, a slow week shows up while there's still time to act.

Then there are the bills: paying suppliers (payables) and collecting what customers owe (receivables). You can run these yourself or hand them to our back office for a small fee. Our guide to what a flooring franchise costs covers the fees and running costs.

Every quarter, you also step back from the week. Our coaching includes KPI dashboards, quarterly reviews and peer groups, where you can compare notes with others running our showrooms.

What is it like to own a flooring franchise?

It suits some people far better than others. Be honest about four things:

• Six days a week. The showroom trades Monday to Saturday, and owners should expect to be on the floor six days a week, especially in the first year.
• Leading people. The showroom runs through your team, so hiring and coaching matter as much as selling.
• Juggling installs. One late delivery or moved install date can ripple through the week, and customers will want to know what's happening.
• Working within a system. As business.gov.au explains, a franchisee follows the operating procedures the franchisor sets, and the franchisor can change how you must operate. In return, you don't build the systems, supplier deals or showroom design yourself.

If you enjoy people, like selling and want to lead a team, this may be your kind of week. Our guides to changing careers into a flooring showroom, choosing a showroom or a van and franchise vs independent stores are good next reads.

When you can picture this week in your own town, see the open territories, from Ballarat to Shepparton, or check whether your area is open. It takes about two minutes.

Questions

How many hours does a flooring showroom owner work?

Our showrooms trade 9am to 5pm, Monday to Saturday, and owners should expect to be on the floor six days a week, especially in their first year. Planning and paperwork can add time outside trading hours.

Does a flooring franchise owner install the floors?

No. The owner leads the showroom team, and installs are scheduled with installers through the job management system.

How long after ordering is a floor installed?

Across our three company showrooms, over the 12 months to October 2026, the typical (median) install happened about three weeks after the order, and most happened between about two and six weeks after it. Every job is different, so that's a past pattern, not a promise.

What support does a franchise owner get week to week?

Live dashboards, automatic follow-ups, national pricing drop-shipped to site, the video and written procedures, and coaching with quarterly reviews and peer groups, plus back office support for a small fee.

Sources

• National Floors franchise opportunity: hours, training, systems and support
• National Floors sales orders, 12 months to October 2026 (our three company showrooms; anonymous figures, rounded)
• business.gov.au: Buy a franchise
• ACCC: Repair, replace, refund, cancel
• ACCC: Online reviews for product and services
• Google: Maps user-generated content policy, prohibited and restricted content