A supply business sells material and stops there. That was never the interesting part.
The interesting part happened when the trades started buying. An installer who buys stone or tile or cabinets from you is not just revenue. He is a working relationship with a man who knows how to put your material into a building. Sell to enough of them and you haven't just built a customer list. You've built a workforce.
That's the flip: every customer is also capacity. When a project here needs crews, the crews are already known. They already trust the material because they buy it themselves. They already know the pricing is real because it's the same pricing they get. There's no audition, no bid theater, no stranger risk on either side.
It runs the other direction too. The tradesmen who buy material here hand back their real labor numbers, not padded bids. They're not quoting a stranger; they're quoting their supplier. So the operation underwrites projects with labor costs that are actually true, which is worth more than any margin on the material itself.
Sell to the trade, and the trade builds for you. The network feeds itself: material moves out, capacity comes back, projects get built, projects need material. Most businesses have customers or a workforce. A network done right is both at once.