I bought into a flooring business.Then built the software I couldn't find.

I spent years delivering technology across Europe, the US and Asia for large listed businesses. In February 2025 I bought a 50% share in a flooring business — trade counter, retail showroom and commercial contracts. As I got into the industry, one thing genuinely surprised me.

The UK flooring industry is worth billions a year, and yet there were almost no modern tools built specifically for independent flooring retailers and fitters. Most businesses were still running on spreadsheets, paper plans, a calculator and general-purpose software that was never designed for the way a flooring company actually works.

So I built it

Rather than accept that, I decided to do something about it. After a career building software for businesses many times the size, I knew what good looked like and what it took to build. I put my own money into PlanIt — not as a software company, but as a fix for our own business. The aim was simple: quote faster, cut waste, protect margin, and give flooring businesses the modern tools they deserve.

The roll optimiser came first, because that is where the money leaks. Then the quoting, the cutting sheets, the job pipeline. Then the till, the stock and the customer accounts. Every part of it was built against a real shop, with real jobs going out of a real door.

Then we started using it properly. And once I saw what it did to our week, I couldn't see the sense in keeping it to ourselves.

If it can make that much difference to our business, why would I only give it to us?

Why the trade pays for it

For the first year I gave PlanIt away. That was the right way to start — it got the software into real shops and the feedback that came back is why it works. But it was always funded on the assumption that the business would be paid for some other way: by a distributor, by a buyer, by somebody further up the supply chain.

I've decided not to take that route. The more time I spent in this industry, the clearer it got that a tool paid for by a supplier eventually starts working for the supplier. Your buying prices, your margins, who you buy from and what you make on it — that is exactly the information somebody upstream would most like to see, and the only way I can promise it stays yours is to not be funded by them.

So PlanIt is paid for by the people who use it. Independent shops are up against national chains with software budgets they'll never match, so the price has to be one a real shop can wave through: £19 a month for a fitter, and unlimited quotes on every plan, because metering the thing you're paid to do is a nonsense. It's the difference between a tool that answers to the trade and one that answers to somebody else.

This still isn't really about selling software. It's about helping independent flooring businesses save time, win more work, cut waste and make more money — and being independent enough to keep doing it. Between us, we can build the software this trade should have had years ago.