Buttonx started out with a plumber's problem. A plumber was disgusted with always being out of common items. Adding further insult to injury, he realized he was paying employees $60.00 an hour to drive across town and purchase a 50 cent part. These trips were a daily occurrence, that was dragging heavily on his bottom line. As we discussed the problem, the supplier had his own situation. "How do I make sure they drive across town to my shop?"

The core issue was a matter of good old fashioned laziness, who wants to count inventory on a Friday? Never mind that missing a count will fuel the stock problem, that is sure to hit on Monday. Plumbers just want to get the job done but teaching employees to plan ahead is a dubious proposition, when they are not the ones paying for their labor hours.

This began ButtonX, a simple solution for inventory management. Why not place an easy button on the shelf, next to common items in the customer's shop? Any employee should be able to look into a bin and see that it is near empty and press a button or tap their phone to place an order. Well that's exactly what we did, point of use ordering at the press of a button or tap of a phone.

Sales increased immediately and the plumber was able to reduce labor hours day one. We just had one major problem, our solution maxed out the home brew server it started on as we were now serving over 1,000 push button orders from 15 separate plumbing and heating businesses every month. So we made the decision to bring in computer experts, who we felt could solve human problems without the typical delays and wizardry we had to deal with in past IT solutions.

Our problem was solved but we realized we were not the only ones who could use this solution for simplifying profit. We discovered that we were good at solving order problems and we've been doing it ever since!