The first contractor account I opened wasn't planned. It happened on a Tuesday in February of 2018, four months into the storefront era, when a guy named Rob walked in with a list of nine guys he needed to outfit for a commercial job starting Monday. He didn't have all the cash. He had about half. He asked if I'd let him put the rest on a tab.
I didn't have a tab system. I didn't have anything. I had a cash register, a credit-card reader, and a notebook. So I wrote down what he took, what he paid, and what he owed in the back of the notebook, told him I'd see him Friday for the rest, and shook his hand.
Friday, he came in. Paid the rest. Didn't even look at the notebook to verify what I'd written. Asked if he could do the same thing the next month for a different job.
That was the first account. The arrangement was simple — I'd outfit his crew, write down the total, and he'd settle within 14 days. It worked because Rob was the kind of guy who paid. There are guys who pay and guys who don't. After eight years, I can usually tell which is which in the first conversation. Rob was clearly the first kind.
Over the next three months, two more contractors asked for the same arrangement. By the end of 2018, I had eleven accounts. By 2020, twenty-three. By 2024, around fifty. The accounts are not most of my revenue — most of my revenue is walk-in cash and card. But the accounts are the thing that makes the storefront a real business and not just a retail operation. Accounts give me a forecast. Accounts give me a reason to stock specific inventory in specific sizes I know specific guys will buy. Accounts make me a vendor to the trades, not a store the trades happen to walk into.
What I've learned about running accounts:
1. The handshake is the contract. I've had two guys in eight years not pay what they owed. Both of them I knew within five minutes were not going to pay. I should have trusted that instinct. Trust the instinct.
2. The notebook is fine. I tried a fancy POS-integrated accounts system in 2021 and abandoned it within a year. The notebook is faster, the customers like it better, and nothing has gone missing. Some businesses don't need software for everything.
3. Accounts work because the contractors and I have to see each other again. The economic relationship is not the only relationship. We talk about jobs, families, problems with the city, the weather. The account is just the line that makes the conversation continue.
Rob still has an account. He outfits two crews now, both of them larger than the original nine. I've known his kid since the kid was eight. The kid's seventeen now and works summers at the shop bagging deliveries. That's eight years from a Tuesday in February. That's the whole thing.