The challenge
Ray & Sons sells mini excavators, mini skid steers, attachments and outdoor power equipment, run by David Ray with his father and brother. David does most of it. In his own words at the start: “I'm strapped to this phone and computer all day.”
Buying well is the whole business. Inventory comes from online and live auctions across the East Coast, Ohio to Rhode Island, which means sitting on auction screens and bidding live. Every lot needs research on what comparable units actually sell for. Then it has to be listed, priced, photographed, posted, and every inquiry answered by phone, text and Marketplace message.
Downstream was the same story. Every unit in meant a manual Square entry. Bookkeeping meant hand-built spreadsheets from purchase invoices. The business had done roughly $150,000 in its first four to five months, and the owner was the bottleneck on every next dollar.
The approach
We built a system that does the watching and leaves the deciding to David. The core is a sourcing agent that monitors auction activity and scores candidate lots — with cited comparables behind every score, so he sees the evidence, not just a number. Around it: a daily Square inventory sync, QuickBooks Online integration, a live business website, and an operations dashboard that pulls from all of it into a single morning briefing — sales, stock, calendar, the emails that need attention first, and the auctions coming up.
Claude Code was installed and hardened on David's own machine, with guardrails configured before anything touched a live system. The agent is blocked from bidding, checking out or paying on its own. The business owns the setup outright; nothing runs on infrastructure it doesn't control.
Delivery to production
Phase one covered installation, security hardening, credential handling, and capturing how the business actually works — the rules of thumb on margins, transport and refurb that make an agent useful instead of generic. Phase two shipped the working system: sourcing agent, Square sync, QuickBooks integration, the website live with SSL, and the dashboard with its daily briefing. Facebook and Google Workspace were wired in for posting and inbox triage.
Phase three was the handoff. David now operates and extends the system himself. Since the engagement closed he has added wholesalers and overseas OEM suppliers to the sourcing dashboard, built a delivery-delay timeline from supplier emails, and wrote his own auction bid calculator with the fee math worked out per lot. Support Forge advises; David builds.
“I used to start the day by opening four things and trying to remember what I was worried about. Now it's one screen before I've finished my coffee — what sold, what's in stock, what needs doing today. I'm out and about my day by the time I used to still be at the desk.
Before I bid now, the fee math is already worked out — the buyer's premium, where it's capped, what the haul costs, what it actually lands at. That used to be me with a calculator the night before, and half the time I skipped it and guessed. Guessing on a $10,000 machine is expensive.”
Results
- Revenue scaled from roughly $150,000 over the first four to five months to more than six figures per month
- $2,728.50 in completed sales recovered that Square reporting had skipped — now swept automatically every morning
- A checkout bug that mis-sold inventory found and fixed per-variation, verified against real orders
- Auction research down from dozens of hours to “a few here and there” (owner’s estimate)
- Inventory and bookkeeping time cut to “a fraction” of what it was (owner’s estimate)
- Owner-operated after handoff — the business extends and maintains the system independently
David credits the systems as “one of the main reasons we've been able to scale” — his time moved from paperwork to finding deals. Every figure above is his, confirmed in writing before publication.
What's next
David has referred two other business owners to Support Forge unprompted, telling one that building the dashboard and integrations “has turned literal hours of work into minutes.” The business is extending the same approach to sales content and supplier management, and the system as delivered does not require Support Forge to keep running.