It all started one day when a business owner asked me if I could help them build a website. While I’m not exactly a web developer, a basic website is almost always an easy enough task, so I set something up for them at no cost, they took ownership of it and all was well. Shortly after this, I quit working in the tech industry.
Then another friend/business owner asked me to help him build a website and online storefront. While this was certainly a much larger project, I gave it a shot and pretty quickly, he had orders coming in. Unfortunately, the orders were for some discontinued item and had to be refunded. This was proof of at least two things for me. First, that I could certainly provide adequate service to implement something on this scale and second, that my concerns about inventory availability were not unfounded. I knew there were limitations in the solution and they manifested as expected.
At this point, I had helped a couple of friends and didn’t think much more of it. Then, I bought a small town hardware store.
From the beginning, it was obvious that there were many areas stuck in the past. Just two examples are the archaic palm barcode scanner with an add-on modem to upload your order to the distributor and the cash register from 1982 that would beep obnoxiously at you if you pressed keys outside the prescribed sequence. I ditched the palm device immediately in favor of web based ordering using an iPad mini with a Bluetooth barcode scanner but left the register in place. This is where my first thoughts of a technology gap began.
Obviously, there was no website for this hardware business, so that was where I started. A basic website and taking ownership of the top 3-5 search result pages for the business (google business, bing business, yelp, yellow pages, etc.) seemed like a good start. Then one day, I was putting price stickers on some tubes of caulk and was surprised that our retail price was going down. When my sales rep stopped in to see how things were going, I mentioned the price decrease and he was a bit surprised. This triggered an investigation on both our sides and it was discovered that I had been placed in a “low retail” program that neither of us were aware of. I was less than pleased and reluctantly began searching for solutions to isolate my business from such changes.
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