QUICK READ:
- Ryonet sells screen-printing equipment, with an emphasis on educating its customers.
- After acquiring a business and bringing manufacturing in-house, Ryonet replaced three business systems with NetSuite ERP.
- Ryonet now easily takes on and spins off businesses, using NetSuite to shift models as needed.
- In discussing partnerships and joint ventures, having a robust ERP gives Ryonet a “healthy six-figure bargaining chip,” said its founder.
- After exiting from Ryonet and implementing its own NetSuite instance, Ryonet’s offshoot ROQ.US is doubling in size year over year.
About Ryonet
For four years, Ryan Moor toured in a punk rock band. It was fun, and he picked up plenty of ambition, grit, and confidence. When the band started screen printing custom T-shirts to sell to fans and use for promotion, other bands took notice. They started asking if Moor could sell them the equipment to screen print their own shirts. So, Moor started doing that on eBay in 2002.
Two years later, Moor had met his wife and decided the touring life wasn’t the future he wanted. He attended an internet marketing seminar with his dad, and the duo built an ecommerce platform that Moor started running in his bedroom. He also started promoting his screen-printing business on YouTube in 2005, just as the platform became a force.
Between the ecommerce site, the YouTube channel, and pay-per-click marketing efforts, Moor’s business grew to $8 million in two years. Five years later, Ryonet(opens in new tab) was a $20 million company.
In 2012, Ryonet bought an industrial building and a screen-printing equipment business, which allowed it to start manufacturing its own screen-printing presses. Moor also started two other businesses — one of which sold blank apparel, or apparel with no added decoration. Now with numerous business models, he split the company into subsidiaries.
Today, Moor has transitioned Ryonet, along with several of its former divisions, into a subsidiary of his holding company MARRS Inc., which has five entities and annual revenues of more than $71 million.
Listen to an overview of Ryonet’s NetSuite story:
Replacing QuickBooks, Sage, and a Legacy Ecommerce Platform
Buying the equipment company and bringing manufacturing in-house motivated Moor to investigate new business management solutions. He needed the ability to manage the entire manufacturing process and multiple manufacturing sites with a system that could track item builds, inventory, and works in progress. Ryonet’s current mix of systems — including QuickBooks, Sage, and the ecommerce platform Moor had built in his bedroom — simply couldn’t serve as long-term solutions.
The Ryonet team vetted various ERP systems, eventually reaching a conclusion Moor had already come to: The company needed NetSuite ERP(opens in new tab). In fact, Moor said that looking back, he wishes the team had implemented NetSuite five years earlier, as it would’ve accelerated Ryonet’s growth.
NetSuite Fuels Business Model Adjustments
Ryonet uses NetSuite to adjust business models quickly in ways it couldn’t with competing systems. Whether that’s getting through the pandemic or taking on and spinning off corporate entities as needed, the NetSuite investment has paid dividends in terms of speed and ease of use.
Ryonet hired a NetSuite admin and development team to further tailor and scale the system as needs arise. Moor said this is a huge advantage considering the company has made major strategic adjustments over the past decade, keeping pace with changes in cargo ship logistics or which ports are clogged.
Practically, these changes have looked like:
- Creating integrations with multiple P&Ls
- Bringing distribution in-house after using a third party
- Creating a service ticket system
- Integrating NetSuite CRM with a new ecommerce site
Maximizing the Power of ERP
Ryonet has hundreds of thousands of contacts — current customers, former customers, and prospects — so its NetSuite system holds a massive amount of data. Staff can access charts and dashboards, all in NetSuite or using NetSuite data, from anywhere in the world. Moor can gauge the financial condition of the company at any point in time.
In 2018, Ryonet created a custom P&L report in NetSuite that split its business segments into individual revenue and cost accounts. Once that was done, differences in the various segments’ financial needs became apparent. That insight was core in leading Ryonet to change its business model. Moor created a holding company for Ryonet and its spin-off companies — which included ROQ.US, a joint venture between the former Ryonet team and European parent company ROQ International, the fastest-growing automated screen-printing equipment company in the market.
This ability to create various customized P&L reports and granularly analyze costs continues to inform company leadership on acquisition, joint venture, and subsidiary spinoff decisions. In fact, when determining valuations or ownership splits as part of partnerships or joint ventures, NetSuite’s value as a fully built ERP gives Ryonet a bargaining chip of a healthy six figures, Moor said. Though many of the companies he talks to are much larger, they tend to run on archaic, strapped-together systems. The idea of adopting NetSuite via Ryonet for a more modern ERP approach makes his company much more valuable in these transactions.
Inventory and Supply Chain Management Are Ready for Anything
NetSuite has extremely strong core inventory functionality, Moor said. There’s no need to open up APIs for reconciling inventory on a daily basis and to track discrepancies. Ryonet runs cycle counts and other reconciliations with full insight and ease-of-use in NetSuite Inventory Management(opens in new tab), Moor said.
Of course, nothing disrupted the business or its supply chain more than COVID-19. But Ryonet found NetSuite well-suited to the circumstances. From tracking inventory to managing the supply chain and workforce, Moor saw competitors struggling with questions around when shipments would come in, whether they’d have enough inventory to fulfill orders, and how to maintain peak efficiency while working from home. But Ryonet was ready to go with NetSuite. Its industry slid 80%, then roared back quickly. Ryonet handled both circumstances, even as competitors floundered.
A Subsidiary Doubles in Size
Today, Ryonet and ROQ.US each run their own instance of NetSuite ERP. Many ERP systems aren’t robust enough or don’t offer the easy access required to smoothly reconcile data with other platforms, Moor said, but NetSuite ERP(opens in new tab) makes it easy to share data beyond internal teams.
This is vital for scaling the business. For example, ROQ.US recently integrated NetSuite with a service system for its technicians and machines in the field. ROQ.US also turned off ecommerce in favor of a more lead-gen website approach, using NetSuite CRM(opens in new tab) to manage leads, opportunities, and customers while categorizing customers for data analysis. These capabilities are part of the reason that ROQ.US is doubling in size year-over-year.
A guiding principle permeates Ryonet and ROQ.US: There will be change. But throughout those changes, NetSuite is the data source to rely on. The team will continue using NetSuite to answer questions, make decisions, and pivot the business to keep its growth trajectory heading skyward.