1. Mill, distributor or open market
Most new entrants buy from a distributor rather than directly from a mill, because a direct arrangement usually means volumes and deposits a starting business cannot carry. A distributor gives smaller quantities and some credit at a slightly worse rate. Local rolling mills are a third route, often cheaper and with variable consistency. Whichever you choose, understand exactly how your buying rate is set each day and how quickly it moves, because that is your entire cost base.
2. Rate risk is the business
You buy at today's rate and sell over the following days, so a falling market erodes stock you already own and a rising one hands you a gain. Over a year it averages, provided you sell at today's rate rather than at what you paid. The dealers who lose money are the ones who quote from memory: a staff member billing at yesterday's number on a few tons is a real loss, repeated quietly. Update the rate once each morning and let it flow to every bill.
3. Size-wise stock and what a customer actually asks
Nobody asks how many tons of steel you have. They ask whether you have four tons of 16mm. That question can only be answered if each size is its own line with its own stock and rate — 8mm, 10mm, 12mm, 16mm, 20mm, 25mm and the sections alongside. A dealer keeping one item called Steel knows the total tonnage and nothing anybody wants to know.
4. Weighbridge discipline
Every transaction rests on a weight, and a disputed weight is a disputed bill. Decide whether you bill from a weighbridge slip or from standard piece weights, be explicit with the customer, and record the basis. Keeping standard weights printed at the counter — a 12m piece of 8mm at roughly 4.74 kg, 10mm at 7.4, 12mm at 10.66, 16mm at 18.96 — lets a customer check your arithmetic and ends most arguments before they start.
5. Builder credit is the capital requirement
A builder takes ten to twenty tons a month and pays forty-five to sixty days later, sometimes longer. That is the real capital requirement of a steel business, and it grows as you grow. Set a limit per builder that reflects what you can carry through a slow quarter, bill every delivery with a vehicle number, and send a statement on the first of every month. Those three habits separate steel dealers who expand from steel dealers who stall.
6. The figure to check monthly
Realised rate against cost, size by size. Steel margins are thin enough that a rate slipping on one fast-moving size costs more over a month than any single bad deal. The comparison is a report once purchases and sales are in one system, and it almost always points at a specific size where somebody has been billing from memory rather than from the screen.