Threadco: Whatever It Takes

Tired Of Being Stuck

Most fastener distributors don’t make it ten years. The ones that do usually have something specific going for them — a niche, a region, a relationship roster, a reputation. Threadco Industrial Supply has all four, and the people who answer the phone at the Kennesaw, Georgia warehouse have a three-word answer for why customers keep calling back.

Whatever It Takes

It’s the tagline on the website. It’s painted on the truck. More importantly, it’s the operating instruction. But before any of that, it was a song on the radio — and before the song, it was two parents in their thirties who were tired of being stuck.

Jeremy Knight had spent fifteen years at a single fastener company. He’d practically run the place: built their computer system, set up part numbers, managed inventory, handled their biggest accounts. The pay raises and promotions never quite caught up to the work. Lindsey, after years as a stay-at-home mom, had taken a receptionist job at an independent insurance agency and worked her way up to Personal Lines Account Manager — eight years there, and a sales education she didn’t know she was getting until she was good at it.

In 2014, they found out they were expecting their fourth child. Their youngest at the time was ten.

“That is when Jeremy and I realized we were tired of being stuck,” Lindsey says. The plan started small: a fastener company, online only, built in evenings around two full-time jobs and a new baby. Jeremy knew the industry. Lindsey could sell. The whole world is held together with nuts and bolts.

We were headed to visit a customer when we heard it on the radio one day, and Jeremy said, “That’s it. That’s our motto.”
— ON HEARING IMAGINE DRAGONS’
“WHATEVER IT TAKES”

Their daughter was born in July 2015. The work was slow. In 2016, Lindsey dropped to part-time at the agency so she could work from home and focus on Threadco. A website went into development with E-Creative Works. Lindsey started calling on small local accounts just to build the name.

Then her grandmother — Granny Mac — passed away. Lindsey’s father had died when she was in high school, and Granny Mac had quietly rewritten her will so that her father’s share would go to Lindsey. That inheritance, Lindsey says, “unknowingly” kept them afloat for what came next.

In July 2017, Lindsey quit her job at the agency and went full-time on Threadco. About a month later, Jeremy was let go from his own. They looked at each other, looked at the inheritance, and decided to go full force.

The first office was a basement. The first warehouse was the family garage. The first truck was old but reliable enough. Lindsey made cold calls until she was tired of picking up the phone. Jeremy ran deliveries and pickups during the day; they did the accounting at night. When the garage overflowed, they rented a storage unit. Then four storage units. By the summer of 2018, the math on the rent argued for a real warehouse. They moved into their first proper space that July, and outgrew it. In January 2021 they moved again, to where Threadco operates today.

Their first big customer arrived about eighteen months after they’d gone full-time. They babied that account, and still do, because that chance — that first leap of faith from a buyer — was unforgettable. So was the first paycheck Threadco ever wrote them. There’s a photo of the two of them, Lindsey in a brand-new Threadco polo, holding the check and smiling.

One Call, Done

Threadco started in fasteners. It still leads with fasteners. But ask Lindsey what Threadco sells today and the list gets long fast: sealants and abrasives, drill bits and cutting tools, hand tools and power tools, custodial and janitorial supplies, paint supplies, bathroom and breakroom goods. “The list is honestly too long to name them all,” she says. “We have slowly moved into a focus of handling everything we can possibly do for every customer.”

That breadth has a strategy behind it. Threadco wants to be the one call. The customer who picks up the phone for a box of 3/8-16 grade 8 hex bolts should be able to add a case of cutting wheels, a tub of sealant, and a pair of cut-resistant gloves to the same order, on the same delivery, from the same person who knows their account.

Most of those customers are manufacturers. Some are more specific than that: there’s a hot rod shop Threadco builds custom kits for — a particular favorite of Jeremy’s, given that his own first car, bought with his own money, was a 1969 Camaro that’s still in the garage. There are cladding contractors. There are job shops. And there are vendor-managed inventory accounts, which is increasingly where the business is heading.

When Threadco hired Kenny Ayers as their dedicated outside sales manager, the VMI side took off. Now Threadco crews visit a roster of customers on weekly orbi-weekly schedules, filling fastener bins and handling whatever else the customer needs. Classic Threadco, Lindsey says, is a manufacturing or cladding customer ordering bulk nuts, bolts, or screws with dock-to-dock delivery. Pull up to the loading bay, unload the order, restock the bins, answer the question the production manager forgot to ask on the last call.

Threadco has been an absolute pleasure to work with. They have made inventory management for critical hardware and other supplies an easy process, and I highly recommend them.
— RICHARD · THREADCO CUSTOMER

The Whatever-It-Takes Roster

Threadco runs eight people today. Lindsey and Jeremy are still full-time at the center of it. Their day jobs have shifted as the company has matured — especially in 2025 and into this year, with Threadco earning its Woman Owned certification in May 2025 and working toward ISO certification, on track for October 2026. Both add audit prep, written procedure, and team training to the work that was already there.

Lindsey Knight SALES MANAGER · HR · ISO
Co-founder. Handles a roster of accounts, the team, and the certification work.

Jeremy Knight OPERATIONS
Co-founder. Bills, payments, payroll, warehouse training, and watching the numbers like a hawk.

David DRIVER — FIRST HIRE
The OG. Has been with Threadco the longest of anyone outside the family.

Micah VMI MANAGER
Driving plus every VMI-managed account.

Tony WAREHOUSE MANAGER
Computer, receiving, shipping, and the daily workload between the warehouse crew.

Ethan WAREHOUSE & KITTING
Pulls orders, builds kits for customers, keeps the place running clean.

Kenny Ayers OUTSIDE SALES MANAGER
Three days a week on the road — prospecting, visiting, making sure customers stay happy.

Brenda INSIDE SALES MANAGER
Works from home. Order entry, quoting, sourcing new items, running the open-order reports that keep workflow honest.

The Knights still keep a handful of accounts each, on top of the managerial work. Everyone on the team gets praise from Lindsey, but when she’s asked who deserves a special mention, the answer is immediate: David, the first hire, the original driver, still on the truck after all these years. “OG wins the special mention.”

The Backbone – A System That Sees

For most of its first decade, Threadco ran on QuickBooks Enterprise — the Manufacturing and Wholesale desktop edition. It was what Jeremy knew. It did what they needed when there were two of them and a basement. As Threadco grew, it started to bend. Quoting, in particular, was painful: a lot of quotes lived on spreadsheets, or in the body of an email, because building a real quote inside QuickBooks was more work than it was worth.

VMI was worse. A vendor-managed order with fifty line items meant manually picking through the screens, item by item, for every visit. Lindsey eventually figured out how to export part of the workflow to Excel, which helped, but the underlying friction never went away.

In 2025, Threadco Switched To The Business Edge^TM

The change Lindsey points to first is, by her own admission, almost embarrassingly simple: she can see sales history right on the order screen. Before, every quote meant leaving the order, hunting down the item in another window, finding the last time she’d sold it, checking what she’d charged, then coming back. Multiply that by every line of every quote. The cumulative time it cost was enormous, and nobody on the team had quite been able to name it as a problem until it was suddenly gone.

VMI got the second-biggest leap. Threadco now prints customer-specific scan stickers for every product they stock at a VMI account. The driver scans each item that needs replenishing; the scan turns into an order back at the office that Lindsey only has to clean up and price. A fifty line VMI replenishment used to be most of a morning. Now it’s a few minutes.

Lot tracking, finally, works. Inventory is manageable. Forms can be tweaked to the way Threadco actually does business. The system, Lindsey says, shows you exactly the information you need to see and lets you put away the rest.

I could probably write a book on how The Business Edge has helped us at this point.
— LINDSEY KNIGHT

The first week after the switch was a baptism by phone calls. Lindsey talked to half the Computer Insights team fifty times each, learning the system live. “Not once did I feel like I was a burden,” she says. She credits Jeff for the big-picture conversations, Angela for the screenshots and the patience on the phone, Diane for putting up with their craziness in training, Gary for translating new technology, and Rachel for the endless small form tweaks. The whole team, in her words, is amazing.

The Next Decade

Ten years in, Threadco has the things that take a decade to build: a customer base that knows the company by name, a product line that keeps widening, a Woman-Owned certification on the wall, an ISO certification on the way, and an eight-person team that punches well above its weight.

The next two to three years, Lindsey expects, will roughly double the team. Another driver. More VMI staff. More inside sales. Threadco is also moving on its own brand identity — possibly some name-brand product lines, still in the “dream stage,” as Lindsey puts it. The website paid for itself, but online sales aren’t where the fastener business actually lives, at least not yet. Threadco plans to keep its old-school, personable, phone-and-truck rhythm even as the rest of the industry digitizes around it.

Whatever it takes, in other words. It’s painted on the truck for a reason.

More Information

Threadco Industrial Supply
Lindsey Knight, Sales Manager
Tel: (770) 880-8299
lindsey@threadcosupply.com
www.threadcosupply.com

Computer Insights, Inc.
Dennis Cowhey, President
Tel: (800) 539-1233
sales@ci-inc.com
www.ci-inc.com