Pate's Hardware Inc.

Jimmy T. Pate is the founder of Pate's Hardware, Inc. In July of 1988 he bought a small hardware store that was closed and out of business at the time of purchase. Before reopening, he completely remodeled, air conditioned and purchased new gondolas. He also built new lumber bins and storage buildings for the lumber and outside merchandise. The original building was about 4,000 sq. ft. Within two years Jimmy had expanded the building. Since then he has expanded three additional times, doubling the main building to 8,000 sq. ft.

In December of 1994, Pate's Hardware, Inc. added a second location in Deleon, TX. The Deleon store is also a full service hardware store and lumberyard. In September of 1995, Jimmy opened a stand-alone rental store. Pate's Rental rents large equipment from backhoes, road graders, trenchers, tractors, down to small hand tools, wedding and party equipment. In 1998 Jimmy added a general office. The general office handles all the paper work for all the locations. In April of 1998, Pates opened a third hardware store in Early, TX. The main building is 10,000 sq. ft. and is surrounded by several lumber sheds and buildings. With the addition of the Early store that gave Pate's four locations.

Pate's Hardware, Inc. has been computerized since they opened, but because of the difficulties with our original compu- ter system they switched to the Advantage System is September of 1992. Advantage was extremely helpful in making the change from one system to another as simple as possible. Since their expansion Advantage has continued to offer assistance and new technology allowing our company to operate on state of the art equipment.

The greatest benefit of using Advantage is the wide range of features that they offer and the technical support to back up these features. "Through the use of Advantage we are able to place our orders electronically, scan products at point-of-sale, receive our shipments by scanning in merchandise, automatically updating sell prices, and many more features. With the support of Advantage and Handy Hardware we will be able to continue to expand and grow with additional locations in the coming years."