Today we’d like to introduce you to Alec McCullough.
Hi Alec, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
Flooring has been part of my life for as long as I can remember.
My family has been in the flooring business for four generations. My great-uncle started the original flooring company in Dallas more than 80 years ago. My dad got into the business as a teenager and spent the next 50 years building flooring companies across Texas, Alaska, and Salt Lake City. He ran Wood Floor Warehouse in Salt Lake for 25 years, so I grew up around the business. I started doing floors with him when I was 12.
After serving a mission in Mexico, I came home and started my first flooring company, ABM Hardwood, in Orem when I was 21. At the time, the goal was practical. I needed a way to pay for school. That business ended up helping me pay for both undergrad and grad school at Indiana University, where I earned a law degree and an MBA.
After school, I went into the corporate world with The Dow Chemical Company. That gave me a very different view of business, systems, and scale. But flooring kept pulling me back. I eventually opened Armory Floors in Houston with my brother Tanner, then later spent about eight years in tech.
Tech was valuable. I learned how to build systems, use data, improve customer experience, and move fast. But the call to come back to the family business became too strong to ignore.
That is how Plank & Go was born.
We built it around a simple idea: buying floors should be clearer, faster, and more honest than the old showroom model. Homeowners should not have to guess from samples under fluorescent lights, wait days for a vague quote, or wonder what is actually included.
We bring the showroom to the home. Customers see curated flooring options in their actual space, under their actual lighting, against their cabinets, walls, and furniture. Then we measure the rooms and build the quote line by line. No black-box pricing. No showroom guesswork.
Outside of work, I’m a husband and dad to three kids: Mia, Jonah, and Olivia. They are 8, 6, and 18 months, so life is full and loud in the best way.
Looking back, Plank & Go feels like the mix of everything I have done: family flooring experience, law and business school, corporate training, tech systems, and a lot of firsthand lessons from job sites. The goal now is simple. Help people choose the right floor before they spend money on the wrong one.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
No. It has not been a smooth road.
My first company, ABM Hardwood, was almost 100% builder-focused. We worked with small and medium-sized home builders in Utah who were building roughly 5 to 25 homes a year, and we handled the flooring for those projects.
That worked until it didn’t.
When the housing market collapsed in 2008 during the subprime mortgage crisis, a lot of those builders either went out of business or stopped building overnight. Not gradually. Overnight. That was my first hard lesson in concentration risk. A good business can still be fragile if too much of it depends on one customer type, one market, or one economic cycle.
Houston brought a different kind of hit.
When Hurricane Harvey came through, our business was flooded badly. We lost about $100,000 in inventory, and our entire showroom was destroyed. We were a small, cash-strapped family business still trying to get our footing, and we did not have flood insurance because we were not in a flood zone. That loss was a hole we never fully recovered from, and it eventually ended the business.
There have been plenty of personal and professional resets too. Tech layoffs. Sudden job changes. Moving our family through Indiana, Texas, Utah, Mexico, and back to Utah. Starting over more than once.
Those experiences shape how we are building Plank & Go.
We are trying to take the best parts of everything we have learned: the craft from four generations in flooring, the discipline from corporate work, the systems from tech, and the scars from businesses that got hit hard by things outside our control.
The goal is not to pretend everything has been clean or easy. It hasn’t.
The goal is to build the best version yet. A flooring company with better systems, better customer experience, less guesswork, and a model that can serve homeowners well without repeating every mistake we had to learn the hard way.
Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
Plank & Go is a mobile flooring showroom built around one simple idea: the best place to choose a floor is the room where the floor will actually live.
We bring curated flooring samples to the customer’s home, help narrow the options, show what works with the home’s lighting and finishes, measure the space, and build a clear quote. The customer does not have to spend Saturdays driving between showrooms or wait a week to find out what the project might cost.
We specialize in hardwood, laminate, LVP, and full flooring projects where homeowners want guidance, not just a stack of samples. A lot of people know they want new floors, but they do not know what will hold up to kids, pets, Utah’s dry climate, stairs, kitchens, basements, or open layouts. That is where we do our best work.
What sets us apart is the buying experience. We are not trying to overwhelm people with a thousand options. We bring the right options, explain the tradeoffs, and build the quote in a way people can actually understand. Product, labor, prep, transitions, stairs, disposal, and scope should not be a mystery.
Brand-wise, I am most proud that Plank & Go feels practical and customer-first. It is not a showroom trying to protect an old way of selling flooring. It is a company built around how people actually want to buy today: in their home, with clear information, less friction, and a real person helping them make a good decision.
I want readers to know we are not just selling floors. We are trying to make the whole process feel more honest and less stressful.
A good flooring project should leave you with a house that feels better, not a buying process you never want to repeat.
We’d love to hear about how you think about risk taking?
I do not think of risk as one big dramatic leap.
Most real risk is a series of decisions where you give up certainty for a shot at building something better. Starting a business at 21 was a risk. Leaving the safer corporate path after law school and an MBA was a risk. Opening Armory Floors in Houston with my brother was a risk. Coming back into flooring after years in tech was a risk too.
The hardest part is that risk does not always punish bad decisions and reward good ones right away. Sometimes you make a good decision and still get hit by timing, a recession, a hurricane, or a market shift. I learned that pretty clearly in 2008 and again during Hurricane Harvey.
So I try to think about risk in two parts.
First, can I survive being wrong? If the answer is no, I need to change the structure. Smaller bet. Better downside protection. More cash. Less dependence on one customer type. Insurance. Contracts. Systems.
Second, is the upside worth the discomfort? Some risks are just ego. Others are worth it because they move your family, your business, or your customers toward something better.
Plank & Go is a risk, but it is not a blind one. It is built on lessons we paid for the hard way. We know flooring. We know what customers hate about the old buying process. We know where past businesses were too fragile. Now the work is building something stronger.
I am willing to take risks. I am less interested in reckless ones. There is a difference.
Pricing:
- Laminate flooring: usually $5.50 to $10.50 per square foot installed, including material and labor.
- LVP flooring: usually $6 to $11.50 per square foot installed, including material and labor.
- Engineered hardwood: usually $9 to $19+ per square foot installed, including material and labor.
- Solid hardwood: usually $10 to $22+ per square foot installed, including material and labor.
- Most full flooring projects: usually $7 to $18+ per square foot installed, depending on product, layout, prep, and project scope.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://plankandgo.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/plankandgo/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/plankandgo/
