How A Fourth-Generation Lumber Dealer Made It Easier For Customers To Pay 

Miles Fitch's great-grandfather started the company in 1907. Miles now runs it with two of his brothers. David handles business development, John does the purchasing, and Miles takes care of finance, IT and operations. He did not set out to join the family trade. He studied mechanical engineering at North Carolina State University and spent 20 years in telecom and technology before his brother talked him into coming home in 2018, right as the third generation was heading toward retirement. 

Fitch works a specific corner of the market. The company supplies materials for custom homes and remodels designed by architects across the Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill area, where universities, high-tech firms and biopharma companies keep the region growing well ahead of the national pace. Most local competitors build subdivisions from a set menu of floor plans. Fitch does the opposite, helping builders and architects track down the exact materials each custom home calls for. 

The company keeps one warehouse campus, two showrooms and a hardware store, and it employs 43 people. Revenue came in around $21 million last year. Custom, made-to-order goods like windows, doors, decking, railing and siding make up a little more than half of what Fitch sells each month, and general contractors bring in almost all of the business. 

Miles walked into a technology problem when he arrived in 2018. The company was still running ECI Advantage, a text-based system it had leaned on years longer than it should have. ECI moved Fitch to Spruce, and Miles used the moment to rebuild everything around it. He wanted his people to be able to work from anywhere, so he put the company in the cloud and moved to Microsoft 365. Fitch went live on Spruce in November 2019, and the timing turned out to be a gift. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit a few months later, the sales staff simply picked up their laptops and worked from home while the business stayed open as an essential service. 

Online payments were another matter. Fitch first ran them through BuilderWire, then switched to ECI's Spec after the BuilderWire arrangement fell apart. Spec brought real gains. It handled e-commerce better, and for the first time it posted payments straight back into Spruce instead of leaving the team to key everything in by hand. 

The customer side did not go as smoothly. Spec's portal put nearly every detail of an account in front of contractors, from credit limits to purchase history, and made the simple act of paying a bill harder to find. It also took away features customers had grown used to, like paying by invoice to catch a discount, settling several jobs at once and pulling invoices down in bulk. 

Miles felt the fallout firsthand. He spent his first six months on Spec writing feature requests and talking customers through payments over the phone, while his accounts receivable staff fixed postings by hand. The experience sharpened his sense of what he was really after. 

The answer arrived out of the blue. In January, ECI's Kristina Henn asked Miles to sit in on a demo from a company called DryPowder and share his take. Kevin Ehinger showed him the portal, and Miles did not need long to make up his mind. 

"If you could turn that on for me tomorrow, I would pay for it," he told them afterward. Two weeks later, ECI acquired the company. 

Miles sums up the customer portal in two words: beautifully simplistic. Contractors open it, see what they owe by job, pick the invoices they want to pay and move on. 

Simplicity mattered more than it might seem. A lot of Fitch's customers run projects for a living rather than balance books, and they tend to warm to new technology slowly. A payment screen anyone can figure out means fewer of them call in stuck, which gives Miles's team back its time. 

It changed how his staff works, too. Miles used to pull all of his aging analysis data out of Spruce himself. Now the portal flags the late accounts that need attention first, and his accounts receivable specialist, Chelsea, took to it right away. 

The features customers had missed came back as well. They can pay by invoice and grab the discount that goes with it, which Spec never allowed. A recent release lets them clear several jobs in one payment. One of Fitch's busiest builders juggles six to 10 houses at a time and had been paying as many as 10 times a month. Now he pays once. 

Miles already sees where all this leads. By leveraging Drypowder, the organization can achieve meaningful efficiency gains and reduce manual effort across critical processes. Over time, these productivity improvements may allow natural attrition, such as retirements, to be managed without requiring a one-for-one replacement of headcount, generating long-term operational savings. 

He credits the DryPowder team for turning his feedback around quickly, a welcome change from the long waits he remembers on Spec. He has kind words for his implementation contact, Jessica Eastep, too, calling her refreshingly fantastic. 

The part Miles likes best is what it frees him up to do. 

DryPowder gives Spruce customers a way to offer online payments without building a full e-commerce operation first. That suits dealers who sell on relationships and jobsite know-how rather than retail traffic, and Miles thinks plenty of his peers fit the description. 

"I don't think anybody wants to be sent checks in the mail anymore," he said. His advice to anyone weighing it is short. If you want your customers paying online with less work on your end, do it. 

Fitch Lumber Company modernized customer payments by replacing Spec's payment portal with DryPowder, ECI's accounts receivable solution for Spruce. The fourth-generation dealer now gives contractors a simple way to pay by job, pay by invoice for discounts and settle multiple jobs at once. Four general contractors used it during the beta, and Miles Fitch expects it to reduce support calls and free up back-office staff for higher-value work. For dealers who sell on relationships rather than retail traffic, DryPowder adds online payments to Spruce without the lift of a full e-commerce build.