ECi RockSolid Provides Solid Foundation for Hardware Store Turnaround Effort

jim hilliard siesta key hardware rocksolid

Jim Hillier stands outside his hardware store.

Dealership:: Siesta Key Hardware; Sarasota, Florida
Industry:: Hardware
Products:: Hardware; Fishing Equipment; Beach Supplies; Office Supplies
Affiliation:
In Business Since:: 1972

Siesta Key Hardware uses:: POS software for hardware and lumber dealers

After close to 30 years as a contractor for the U.S. Navy, working on electronic equipment and systems engineering, Jim Hillier was ready for a change. The opportunity came up to buy a small hardware store just four blocks from his home. Jim did his due diligence, put together a financing package and, in remarkably short order, he and his wife Patricia were the proud owners of Siesta Key Hardware, a Do it Best retailer in Sarasota, Florida.

That was back in November of 2006, and even though Jim had no background in hardware or retail of any kind, he figured the computer skills and project management expertise he had gained as a contractor with the Navy would stand him in good stead and he could soon learn the rest.

But as he and Patricia started to settle into their new business home, Jim soon realized his learning curve was going to be more than just a little bumpy.

“Putting it kindly, the store was a mess,” he recalls. Virtually all the product was tagged manually and, most of the time, no two items had the same price.

Adding further to Jim’s problems, the previous owners had run into some financial difficulties and been cut off temporarily by Do it Best Corp., so some of the inventory came from places like Walgreen’s and other sources Jim could only speculate about.

I have huge respect for the folks at RockSolid and the way they’ve designed their system. It’s very flexible, it’s very affordable and you can start small and expand as your business grows.

And even though he received a detailed inventory when he bought the store, his confidence in its reliability quickly evaporated as the true dimensions of what he had bought sunk in.

“In retrospect, I was just a little naïve,” he admits ruefully. The good news, though, is that those early days are now nothing more than a distant memory. Thanks to Jim’s own management skills and more than a little help from key business partners like Do it Best Corp. and ECi RockSolid, Siesta Key Hardware today is a stable, growing and profitable enterprise.

But it didn’t, of course, happen overnight

“The store had been neglected and even the very basic part of the business needed work,” Jim remembers. Step one in his turnaround plan was about as basic as it gets—designing and installing a checkout counter.

Step two was equally basic: finding a computer system to run things and automate, as quickly as possible, the labor-intensive processes that were draining away profits.

Jim looked at off-the-shelf accounting packages like QuickBooks and Peachtree and checked out other industry-specific packages like Activant. But they were all either too generic, too expensive, or both.

"Just go out and get RockSolid"

Then, he met a fellow Do it Best dealer in nearby Boca Grande who told him about RockSolid. “It was probably the best piece of advice I got for my business at the time,” Jim says. “He told me, ‘Don’t even think about another system … just go out and get RockSolid.’”

Jim set up the system in his office and began putting it through its paces. Initially, one of his old cash registers sat on the checkout counter as backup in case of problems, but as his use of RockSolid grew, so did his confidence in the system.

I have so much better control of my inventory than I did before RockSolid. I know what moves, I know how much to order and 90-percent of our stock is now on automatic order which is a huge time saver.

“I put the old cash register away after the first month, and from then on it was just a question of learning more about the system as I used it,” Jim reports.

After working nearly 30 years on technology for the Navy, Jim brought an expert technical eye to RockSolid and the more he looked the more he liked what he saw.

“I have huge respect for the folks at RockSolid and the way they’ve designed their system,” he says. “It’s very flexible, it’s very affordable and you can start small and expand as your business grows.”

It helped, too, that the productivity gains RockSolid generated for the store meant the system pretty much paid for itself in its first year of operations.

A brand-new store

The business Jim Hillier runs today is far different from the one he took on five years ago. “I have so much better control of my inventory than I did before RockSolid,” he reports happily. “I know what moves, I know how much to order and 90-percent of our stock is now on automatic order which is a huge time saver.”

Before RockSolid, it would take us a full week to get our monthly statements out; now we do it in just a couple of hours.

The system has also generated significant productivity gains on the accounting side. “Before RockSolid, it would take us a full week to get our monthly statements out; now we do it in just a couple of hours,” he says. “And when a customer calls with a question about a past purchase, we’ve usually got the answer for him before he finishes the question.”

More recently, Jim has also started to put RockSolid to work as a powerful new customer service tool. “We have one account who’s ordering for several of her own clients,” he explains. “With RockSolid, it’s easy to break down her business into sub-accounts with their own separate statements and that not only makes things a lot easier for her, but we’ve also seen her orders grow because she really likes the convenience.”

"None of this would have been possible without RockSolid"

Florida over the past few years has not been an easy place for anyone to do business, but you wouldn’t know it from looking at Jim Hillier’s books. Despite the double whammy of a collapse in the housing market and a severe financial meltdown, Jim’s store has posted year-over-year sales gains ever since he opened.

The exciting thing is that we’re still learning about the system and finding new ways to run our business smarter and more profitably.

After five years, Jim is very much on the right side of his learning curve. He knows what drives sales and profits at his store. His inventory is under control, his productivity is up and his margins are moving very much in the right direction.

None of this, he freely admits, would have been possible without RockSolid. “We’ve come a long way over the past five years but we couldn’t have done it without RockSolid,” he proclaims. “And the exciting thing is that we’re still learning about the system and finding new ways to run our business smarter and more profitably.”