Coosa Valley Milling & Hardware

If you live in Shelby County, Alabama, there is a reasonable chance you have hauled a fifty-pound bag of feed out of the same building under the same green sign for as long as you have owned animals to feed. Coosa Valley Milling & Hardware sits on Highway 25 in Wilsonville, a few miles from the Coosa River that gives the store its name, and it has been the place to come for chicks, horse pellets, hardware, and the kind of small-town conversation that a chain store cannot fake.

Frank McEwen Jr. helps run the operation alongside his father Frank Sr., his mom, and a tight crew that includes general manager Bryan, inventory lead Tim, and counter clerk Selena. The same family also operates McEwen & Sons, a stone-ground grits, cornmeal, and polenta business that ships nationwide out of the same Wilsonville footprint. Most of the milling and hardware side runs in-store, because as Frank Jr. has been known to point out, fifty-pound bags of feed are not exactly what you would call a graceful e-commerce shipment.

A Wrong Turn at the POS

In the summer of 2025, Coosa Valley made a perfectly reasonable point-of-sale decision that quickly turned into a perfectly unreasonable headache. They signed with RHM POS in August, expecting a system that would handle their hardware ordering, their charge accounts, and the dozens of feed vendors they juggle every week. What they got instead was an inventory module nobody had been trained on, and an implementation experience that left the team flying blind from the very first day on the system.

"We went through the pain of transitioning to a new system from an old system, and it beat us in the tail. So the biggest thing for us is: how simple is this going to be?"

By the time Derek Etgen reached out from Rundoo at the end of January 2026, Frank already knew that the August decision was not going to age well. The complication was that the credit card processing piece had been bundled into a multi-year hardware contract that ran all the way through 2027, and walking away from a system you only just signed for is the kind of move that requires both conviction and a sharp pencil.

The Demo That Convinced Six People at Once

Derek drove down for an in-person demo on February 4, 2026. By the end of the meeting, Frank Jr., Frank Sr., the family matriarch, Selena from the counter, Bryan the general manager, and Tim from inventory had each walked through the system and arrived at the same answer independently of one another. Every single person in the room recommended the switch.

What sold the team was a stack of capabilities that the previous system either failed at or simply did not have. The Rundoo customer app for charge-account holders, the AI-driven checks that flag pricing and inventory discrepancies before they ever hit a receipt, the live integrations with Orgill, Florida Hardware, Tucker, Purina, and J&J Bagging, and the kind of interface that does not require a thirty-page training manual just to ring up a sale. For a feed and hardware store carrying thousands of SKUs across a hundred different ways a sale can shake out, that combination was the difference between guessing and knowing.

Rundoo also helped Coosa Valley work through the credit card processing buyout, structuring an offset on the monthly fee and discounts on implementation and transaction rates so the math actually penciled. By February 12 the deal was signed, and within days the data team was already pulling Coosa Valley's history out of RHM and into Rundoo.

Eight Weeks of Training, and Then Some

Vidhan Agrawal led the implementation, and over the course of two months he ran the Coosa Valley team through a system unveil, six full training calls covering everything from charge accounts to purchase orders to special pricing tiers, a hardware setup session, and an accounting mapping exercise with David Levieddin to align Rundoo's control accounts with the QuickBooks chart of accounts that Frank Jr. was newly inheriting from the previous bookkeeper. The original go-live was scheduled for April 1, but the team agreed to push it two weeks to April 15, 2026, so that the data team could finish a clean migration without anyone scrambling on launch morning.

Hardware-wise, the new setup included two thermal receipt printers, integrated card readers with tap-to-pay, four Yubikeys for staff authentication, and a fresh stack of barcode scanners to keep the receiving line moving when the feed truck rolls in on a Tuesday. The card readers boot to a screen displaying the Coosa Valley Milling & Hardware logo, which is precisely the kind of detail that signals to a customer they are at a real store and not at a generic strip-mall kiosk.

Cluck Yeah, We Have Chicks

If you swing by Coosa Valley in the spring, the marquee out front will tell you exactly what is in stock, and the answer is usually some combination of chicks, ducklings, and the punniest sign in central Alabama: Cluck Yeah, We Have Chicks! The team rotates fresh batches of bantams, layers, and gosling-grade ducklings into the brooders every season, and on a busy weekend the chicks line up in cardboard flats by the door like very small, very loud product displays.

That is the part of a feed store that the spreadsheet view never really captures. Chains can move pallets and warehouses can move cases, but a community feed store is the place where someone walks in for ten chicks and three bags of starter, and walks out with a question answered, a recommendation given, and the right poultry feed for the breed they just took home. Rundoo's job is not to replace any of that. Rundoo's job is to make sure the system behind the counter does not slow it down for a single second.

Up and Running, and Asking the Right Questions

Coosa Valley Milling & Hardware went live on Rundoo on April 15, 2026. In the weeks since, Frank Jr. has been one of the most engaged operators in the company's recent batch of go-lives, working through detailed questions about how purchase orders allocate freight and discounts across line items, how to configure default credit limits for new charge accounts, and how to print PO drafts that show quantity-on-hand alongside the ordered quantities so the receiving team can compare at a glance. These are the kinds of questions that come from someone actually running a business on the software, not someone wrestling with it.

Six months ago Coosa Valley was on a system that had been sold to them on promise and delivered on neither training nor support. Today they are on a system that Frank Jr. helps push, that Selena runs from the front counter, that Bryan trusts with the inventory, and that Tim uses to keep the receiving accurate down to the bag. The feed bags still weigh fifty pounds, the chicks still need warm boxes, and the grits side of the family business keeps grinding away. The only thing that really changed is that the back office finally caught up to the rest of the operation.