The Great Falls Flooring Guy: How Chad Swift Is Building the Next Generation of Floors & More

Chad Swift grew up inside his family's flooring business, Floors & More, without ever expecting to want it for himself. The showroom was in his dad's garage in the early days, samples lined up along the wall for whoever pulled in after work hours. Chad was often there with Neil as a kid, watching him work.

"I never even thought of the business as anything successful," he says. "It was just something my parents did during the day."

These days, Chad runs Floors & More with a different goal entirely. He's not trying to be the biggest flooring operation in Great Falls. He wants to be the best one.

"I just want to be the best," he says. "All I ever wanted was for someone to eventually just be like, oh yeah, that's the flooring guy."

A Business Built in a Garage

Floors & More started in 1990, in Chad's dad's garage. Neil Swift had grown up around flooring (his own father ran a tile business in Salinas, California) and a flooring job is what first brought Neil to Great Falls, to lay the wood parquet in the Holiday Village Mall. He met Chad's mother, Gretchen, while on a job in Helena, where she ran an ice cream parlor. After they got married, Neil kept installing, and Gretchen worked nights as a nurse, and somewhere in between they started selling flooring out of the garage.

"My mom was working shifts, so there were times when Neil had a night job and we'd be sleeping on pallets while he would do flooring installations," Chad says.

Neil earned a reputation in the trade as the guy who could cut an elk or a trout into a sheet of vinyl, a detail old-timers in the business still bring up to Chad decades later. "Your dad was one hell of a sheet vinyl guy," they'll tell him.

Early on, they joined Abbey Carpet & Floor, a buying group that kept prices competitive and helped Neil and Gretchen navigate things they didn't yet know how to handle, like setting up credit card machines. As the business grew, it moved from the garage to a small shop in an alley, and eventually into the building downtown Great Falls that houses Floors & More today. The building was largely abandoned when they bought it. The main floor became the showroom, and Chad spent his summers helping build out apartments upstairs as the business slowly filled the space around it.

Neil hired his first employee, Todd Klasner, in the business's second year. Todd is still there today, now the head estimator. A few years later, Neil brought on Todd's brother, Tom Klasner, who still runs the warehouse. Three decades in, it's largely the same team.

Neil and Gretchen still come into work every day. Neil handles the custom window coverings, and Gretchen still does the office work and vacuums the showroom herself, three times a week. Now Chad's girlfriend of 12 years, Jen, works there too, and the business continues to feel more and more like a family affair.

Choosing Everything Except the Family Business

For a long stretch, Chad avoided the flooring business. He tried construction and got hurt. He sold TV ads. He ran a downtown bar, working an eight-to-five job and then bartending until three in the morning, most nights, for a year and a half.

"I just always assumed after I got done with high school that I would just never work for my dad," Chad says.

The shift came in 2014, almost by accident. Chad was looking to buy a different business and came up short on financing. He went to Neil and Gretchen to ask what they thought about pitching in on buying another business, and they turned the question back on him: why hadn't he ever looked at buying into theirs.

"We pulled the numbers and started looking at it, and I just said, yeah, why haven't I?" Chad says.

The first four years were lean while he learned the business. What changed things wasn't a strategy so much as a shift in how decisions got made. Once the ownership was official, every call ran through a different filter.

"It put it in cement that we're now partners," Chad says. "It took it from 'my son works here, that's my kid,' to a business partner. Every decision is made by asking what would the other partners think about this? Not what mom and dad think about this."

No Commission, No Shortcuts

Floors & More built its reputation on price. "We are for sure the most competitive," Chad says. But he's quick to point out that price isn't really what keeps customers coming back. He's found that what people really want is good service and someone they can trust.

There's no commission structure at Floors & More, and no sales quotas. Chad says that's deliberate. The only question he wants a customer facing is what's right for their house, not what earns his team the biggest check. He extends the same philosophy to the installers he works with, treating them less like subcontractors and more like partners.

"I think our advantage is that if you always do what's right, it never comes back on your schedule," Chad says.

When a job goes sideways, and it does, his team owns it.

"We're so organized that when things come up, they're truly mistakes, truly things people could not have foreseen," he says. "Somebody will stop what they're doing and show up at your house to fix it."

Find a Problem and Fix It Kind of Guy

Community involvement was never something Chad decided to prioritize. It's just what he watched his parents do, whether that meant the Lions Club, the Elks Club, coaching soccer, coaching T-ball, and showing up in the community.

"I just thought that's what you did," Chad says. "I just thought part of life was giving back."

Chad calls Great Falls "the biggest small town in the world." Nearly everyone he grew up with still lives there, and most of their parents knew each other decades before that. "Anytime somebody moves from a different town, they love this town," he says. To Chad, that's reason enough to make the community a place worth living in, instead of complaining about what it isn't. "I've never had a lot of patience for complaining about things you're not doing anything about," he says.

Chad got involved with Big Brothers Big Sisters after hearing that kids who aren't reading at grade level by fourth grade are far less likely to catch up later. He's been matched with Littles for more than three years now, working closely with school staff to keep them on track academically. If he misses a day with him, he makes up for it by showing up twice the next week. That commitment earned Chad the organization's Big Brother of the Year honor in 2025. His Little is now reading at a proficient level, and Chad says he's looking forward to more time together in the coming school year.

That same instinct is behind a project Chad has dedicated a lot of time and attention to over the past two years: a flooring installation school he helped start at Great Falls College in 2024, the first of its kind in Montana.

The trade has an aging problem. Installers are getting older every year, and fewer of them are training new installers the way they used to, which means every retirement leaves one less person behind them. The ten-week course takes people with no experience and sends them out with their own tools and a track record of showing up on time. Tuition is typically covered for anyone who submits a short video to the Floor Covering Education Foundation, and local vendors donate materials.

In two years, the program has produced seven full-time installers on their way to earning six figure incomes. 

"There hasn't been ten new installers under 40 years old in Montana for 20 years," Chad says. "Between the last two years, there's seven full-time guys that are two years away from having their own business."

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What's Next 

Ask Chad what the next five to ten years look like for Floors & More, and the answer isn't a second location. It's mostly invisible to a customer walking through the door: new software, less paperwork, more efficiency behind the scenes.

"I've come to find out that when you're not chasing the numbers, you're just chasing how it's done right, making sure everything's going good," Chad says. "The numbers just seem to take care of themselves."

It's an outlook he traces straight back to Neil, who's been running the business through three decades of recessions, wars, and whatever the news cycle happens to be worried about that week.

"When you have somebody like Neil that's been at it for 35 years, he's been around," Chad says. "As long as you just keep doing the same thing, it seems like it'll be fine."

Last year, driving to a job site with Todd, Chad looked at the houses they passed and realized they'd done the flooring in most of them.

"I think we finally became the flooring guys," he said to Todd.

He got there the same way his parents did: by showing up, doing right by people, and not worrying about being the biggest flooring business, just the best.

Floors & More has been Great Falls' trusted flooring and window treatment source for more than 30 years. Visit the showroom at 920 1st Ave North, call (406) 761-7820, or find them online at floorsandmoremt.com.