You’ve probably never heard of Progressive Flooring, but you’ve almost definitely walked on its work. Eaten at Olive Garden or Red Lobster? You’ve walked over Progressive. Seen a movie at an AMC theater? You’ve walked over Progressive. It’s a 30 plus-year-old Central Ohio business that is known to companies with hundreds of sites — it has run flooring projects for Red Lobster since the late 1970s and Olive Garden since the 1980s. It oversees a national network of independent installers and maintains warehouses in Tampa, Dallas and Los Angeles to store flooring product for its clients. Still, it remains a relative unknown here, at least for now. In a competitive industry with local players in every market, Progressive is diversifying by expanding into new industries and wants to build a bigger portfolio of work in its own backyard. The following is from a conversation with Nino Cervi, partner and vice president with the company. Who are your key customers? We’ve been with Darden (Restaurants) for 36-plus years. We’ve been with AMC for 16 years. Other brands that we work for, Ruby Tuesdays we’ve been with for 10 years, O’Charley’s, Buffalo Wild Wings. Just last year, we finally were able to get an opportunity to sit down with L Brands. How widespread is your business? We performed about 3,500 projects last year, installed about INDUSTRY NEWS  COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE Progressive Flooring – the biggest flooring contractor you ‘ ve never heard of May 22, 2015, 6:00am EDT Dan Eaton Staff reporter Columbus Business First Share  * 250,000 yards of carpet, approximately 100,000 square feet of ceramic tile, based on our mileage, traveled about 500,000 miles. We were in 34 states and Canada. The very first project we did for L Brands was three La Senza projects in Canada. They threw us a bone and said here’s three jobs in Canada. Just in the last half-year, we wound up doing 18 projects including their marquee, highest-grossing Victoria’s Secret in Times Square. We’re cautiously optimistic. The relationship will develop. But you said you’re looking to make other local connections as well? We have recently, in the past year-and-a-half, focused on trying to help build our business here locally. We’ve hired a local business development person and we have been doing several local projects. We recently completed the U.S. Attorney General’s office. We’re working on the remodel of the COTA bus terminal. We will be starting the Lancaster Municipal Courthouse project. We are bidding on the medical center in New Albany with Elford. There is going to be a large modernization of the (Greater Columbus) Convention Center. We’re working with the architect specing flooring product. That may be a very, very large project for us. Beyond restaurants and movie theaters, what other industries are you looking at? We’d like to get more into hospitality, into medical, into corporate office space. My thought process is, the best way to learn is to do it in a more controlled environment. A more controlled environment means doing it closer to home. As we do those projects we can then possibly expand outward now that we are familiar. Hospitality, which includes hotels, we’ve done the Fairfield Inn up at OSU several years ago. We’ve done those projects, but doing them on a national scale, we need to understand what we’re getting into, what the pricing model needs to be. Having a nice portfolio locally as well as a nice portfolio nationally is just another way of diversifying your business. How much of an opportunity do you see here? There’s one large flooring company here locally, Continental, but there’s a significant gap until the next level of players. We’d like to be a larger player and we see an opportunity to do so. You ask general contractors around here about Progressive Flooring and a lot of them probably haven’t heard of us. I think in the last year that’s started to change considerably. We’ve submitted about 300 proposals to 100 general contractors here in Central Ohio. Bigger picture, what are your goals? I have no specific, “I want to be a $50 million company in five years,” goal. I want to be a very, very successful company and I want to work with brand leaders. With that will come sales and profitability and survival. That’s what directs me. It’s all relationship-centric. Build that and the work will come. Our next remote warehouse location will probably be somewhere like Colorado. If I can run work to Idaho from Colorado, that saves us on logistics. The next evolution would be to expand the role of those remote sites and have client managers there. Right now, they’re strictly logistical operations, where we can send materials to and develop a pool of independent contractors. It minimizes travel time, which makes us quicker. But there is no reason we can’t start generating more business there. That’s one reason we picked those locations. There’s a lot of stuff going on in Dallas, Texas. There’s always stuff going on in California. There’s a lot going on in Colorado now. We need to take advantage of those remote sites.