AcumatiCares
Challenges
When the Bosshardt brothers in Utah couldn’t farm their land because of its large salt deposits, they began mining salt and selling it to cities that used it to melt snow and ice on roads. Decades later, in the 1980s, they started selling consumer salt products, the first of which were sold in Ziploc bags.
Rhett Roberts bought and expanded the company dramatically in early 2000 after serving as a consultant. The company continues to sell tons of salt for use in agriculture and snow removal, mined and milled in the town of Redmond. In addition to Redmond Minerals, Roberts’ holdings include Redmond Inc., Redmond Life, Best Vinyl, Valleywide Fence, Western Clay, and Heritage Farm & Stores.
Redmond Life offers consumer beauty and food products like toothpaste and electrolyte mixes, some of which are produced in-house at Redmond’s 40,000-square-foot facility in Heber City, Utah. Other products are contract manufactured. Redmond Life also supplies outside food businesses with its salt products and counts customers such as Route 11 Potato Chips, Hilary’s, Xochitl Chips and Salsa, and CLIF Bar & Co.
Best Vinyl installs and wholesales vinyl and ornamental fencing materials. It is also a wholesaler of chain link fencing. Valleywide Fence provides similar services and materials as Best Vinyl, but it is located in Grand Junction, Colorado.
Redmond Heritage Farm & Stores, with three locations in Utah, produces raw milk, six varieties of cheese, and eggs from free-range chickens. They also raise cows and pigs for beef and pork products on several local farms.
Some of Redmond’s recognizable brands include Real Salt, Re-Lyte, Earthpaste, Redmond Clay, Redmond Hunt: Trophy Rock, Redmond Minerals, and Best Vinyl Fence & Deck. The companies generate more than $160 million in combined revenues annually.
Couldn’t Handle Large Transaction Volumes
Each of the Redmond companies started on QuickBooks, with some later adding siloed third party and custom software applications.
QuickBooks provides basic accounting functionality as a standalone application. It does not handle inventory, sales, customer tracking, warehouse operations, or project management and does not connect to other applications. As a result, Redmond either added separate applications or custom-built solutions, which worked fine when the companies were small.
Over time, working in so many disconnected systems became problematic. Finance teams created spreadsheets to consolidate information and constantly imported and exported information. It grew challenging to track costs per project and product profitability. Employees found it difficult to track inventory, which was constantly changing, or understand how much cash was tied up in inventory.
All of the Redmond businesses were run differently. Employees at each company spent countless hours a week entering, double-checking, and re-entering data into spreadsheets, which was time-consuming and occasionally led to mistakes, making it hard to trust the data.
Consolidated and other reports were nonexistent and nearly impossible to produce because data lived in siloed systems and often didn’t match. None of the managers had timely information to run their businesses, which, as each started to grow, led to problems with AR, AP, inventory, and production schedules, among other functional issues. A 3-person development team spent months importing and exporting data so a reporting team of another three people could create reports that were outdated the minute they were completed.
Outgrew QuickBooks
“QuickBooks was designed for smaller businesses,” says Aaron Gabrielson, CTO, adding that some of its entities had four employees when they implemented the software, and several now have more than 100. “Best Vinyl was actually using Sage 50 when we purchased them.”
Many Redmond-owned businesses used paper processes to manage various business processes. At Redmond Life, for example, employees tracked order information by pinning paper on a large corkboard to track incoming and outgoing orders. “That’s how it was done for 30 years,” Gabrielson says.
Later they learned “Redmond Life didn’t have its inventory as tight as it needed to be and ran out of materials that took three to six months to correct,” he says. “That cost us $2 million to $3 million because customers couldn’t get products.”
Likewise, he says, Best Vinyl also had trouble tracking inventory and experienced long-term forecasting challenges to determine how much vinyl it needed to purchase. This led to shortfalls and delayed projects.
As transaction volumes increased, QuickBooks slowed and sometimes crashed the on-premises servers, managed by an IT team of six.
