How Westwood Sheds Built a Foundation for Growth

About Westwood Sheds

Westwood Sheds is located just outside Due West, South Carolina. The business name is a nod to the small town that they call home. Founding partners Bobby Eaton, Mike Yoder, Abner Riehl, and Arlan Riehl opened the doors in 2015 as Liberty Storage Solutions of SC. In 2022, Mike and Arlan bought out the other partners and renamed the company Westwood Sheds.

Today the company is vertically integrated and owned by Mike, Arlan and 18 employee/owners. 11 sales locations across South Carolina and Georgia, 1 manufacturing plant, and 4 install crews all run from Due West.

The Challenge

Before Shed Suite, Westwood ran on QuickBooks Online, PDF order forms emailed around for signatures, and spreadsheets for both inventory and the build schedule. A partial ERP implementation had already failed. “It wasn’t the right step for us,” says Arlan. “Both inventory and build process would have been spreadsheet based.”

There was no single breaking point. “It doesn’t feel like we ever had a straw that broke the camel’s back,” Arlan says. “We kind of knew, looking at our plans, that we wanted to get to a certain place and it was going to have to be software that gets us there. You can’t do that very long with those manual processes if you’re looking to scale.”

Delivery manager Joe Fehr felt it every morning. The old system printed a sheet per delivery with the customer’s name, address, and building number. He would find the building on the lot, walk the checklist with the customer, and have them sign the paper. “I just carried a lot of paper with me every day,” he says.

Westwood chose Shed Suite for one reason above the rest. “The easiest answer to that is the intuitiveness,” Arlan says. “It’s really tough to find a piece of software that’s comprehensive, does everything that it needs to, but is easy to use.” That mattered most where staff meet customers: the sales offices and the delivery crew. “You don’t want software workarounds or bad information to have your drivers or your sales crew stumbling around when they’re talking with a customer.”

The version of Shed Suite Westwood started on was light on shop, manufacturing, and purchasing features. Arlan was fine with that. “Do workarounds in your back office. Don’t make your sales crew or your install crew, where you’re interacting with customers, have to do weird stuff to make the software work.”

“After you roll it out, you’ll see as the years go by that that software shapes you. It changes how your people do work. It affects culture.”

Since going live on Shed Suite, Westwood has roughly tripled its sales locations and grown revenue about 4X. The day to day got simple enough that Arlan could step back from it. “When you make your day to day simple, you can plan where you’re going to go next year,” he says. “If you can move from working in your business to working on your business, that’s the piece you’ve got to be able to do.”

His advice to a shed company still on manual processes: “Just do it. There’s a reason I’m wearing a Nike shirt. In the eight years we’ve been with Shed Suite, I’ve not seen anything that would have me recommending anything else.”