Andriot's Paint & Flooring

Nobody at Andriot's went looking for a new point of sale. A Rundoo rep named Matt went looking for Andriot's, walked in through the front door of the store in Shelbyville, Kentucky, struck up a conversation with B.J. Andriot, and started showing him what the software could do. It was a cold call in the most literal sense, the kind where the caller has to wipe his feet on the mat first.

A store he grew up inside

B.J.'s father started the business in 1978, when B.J. was ten years old, and for the rest of his school years the store was a part-time job wrapped around classes. After college he came back in 1991 to work full-time, and he has been at it ever since. He pushed the paint side of the business into something much bigger, eventually took the whole operation over, and watched the growth arrive year after year with the sort of consistency that only shows up when somebody is paying close attention. Flooring and blinds came along the way, though paint and flooring are still the bread and butter.

The fields that fill themselves in

What caught B.J.'s attention during that first walkthrough was not a feature name on a slide, it was watching information populate on its own. He does not consider himself a tech person, so he needed software a non-tech person could run on a busy Saturday, and this one fit. Paint and sundries went well from the start, and the small thing that changed his day turned out to be color names and job names: once a name goes in, it comes back up by itself on the next visit, so a repeat customer's color is already on the screen instead of being looked up from scratch. Paint moves fast enough now that customers get through the counter in a flash and are back out the door with their buckets.

Paint flies, flooring is still catching up

The honest part of the story is the flooring. Rundoo handles paint and sundries beautifully and flooring has been harder, though B.J. is quick to point out that his old system gave him the same trouble in the same places. He bundles flooring with paint under one roof, which is not how most stores in either category are built, and he has watched enough software get better over time to know how this usually goes.

"I know that my store is unique because I bundle flooring with paint. However, I'm confident that the issues with flooring will evolve as Rundoo continues to grow."

There is one more nitpick worth putting on the record, because a story with no nitpicks in it is a brochure. Sundries sometimes mean re-entering a barcode, since the barcode reader reads twelve characters, where the old system carried various identifiers and gave him a bit more room to move.

Two new clerks and one transaction

The previous point of sale had a tendency to malfunction in a hurry if the person at the keyboard did not know exactly what they were doing, which is a nerve-racking quality in the software that runs a store. Changing or deleting an item or a sale in Rundoo is a safer proposition, and that safety shows up most clearly in what happens with new hires. Andriot's brought on two new clerks, and both of them understood how to check out a customer inside their first transaction, which is roughly the length of time it takes to explain the old way of doing it.

People buy from people

The switch was never only about functionality. B.J. liked Matt, thought he was good at his job and a good person besides, and made a decision that plenty of store owners will recognize.

"As they say, people buy from people."

Matt is still at Rundoo, and he runs the sales team now, which means the person who once walked in off the street in Shelbyville is the one sending everybody else out to do it.

No spring chickens required

What B.J. appreciates most about Rundoo is its simplicity, a streamlined version of the system he had before, and a transition that landed far easier than he had braced for.

"I'm no spring chicken, but even for me, Rundoo is easy to figure out."

The younger employees pick it up as though it were second nature, and B.J., who usually takes a while to adapt to new things, got there quickly too. That is the quiet test for software running a family store that has been open since 1978. It has to make sense to the owner who has been behind that counter for decades and to the clerk who started on Tuesday, and it has to do it without anyone scheduling a training week to make it happen.