How ROXBOX runs a modular construction business at full speed with Mercury

Founded almost by accident, ROXBOX has grown from a humble college side hustle into one of the fastest-growing modular construction companies in the U.S. Anthony Halsch, ROXBOX’s founder and CEO, started the business back in 2015 during a summer brokering shipping containers while studying engineering at the Colorado School of Mines. By 2017, ROXBOX was a fully fledged company and had already built its first container bar (a shipping container turned bar) called BeerCan — still the company’s best-selling product today. From there, the business grew into building permanent, container-based structures before expanding into large-scale steel-frame modular manufacturing for quick-service restaurants, retail, industrial buildings, and more.

Today ROXBOX operates out of a 40,000 square foot factory in Houston and builds projects across the U.S. and the Caribbean. As the company has scaled — and shifted from small, single-container structures to multi-module buildings — so too has its financial operation. ROXBOX now runs employee spend, payroll, vendor payments, and international sourcing through Mercury, using a custom account structure and spend management program to keep its fast-moving financial operations running smoothly.

ROXBOX’s entire value proposition rests on speed. Projects that used to take a construction crew months to build on-site now ship out of a factory in weeks, and that urgency carries over into how the company needs to move money.

“The reason why we have a business is because we move faster than any other construction company on the planet,” Halsch said. “With that, we needed a banking provider that also moves as fast as we do, in collecting payments, remitting payments, and payroll.”

That speed is especially critical when something changes mid-transaction, such as project details shifting while payments are already queued up. For ROXBOX, these types of last minute changes no longer cause any stress. Halsch says he can call Mercury and get someone on the phone right away to adjust or pause the payment before it sends. Neither local banks, nor ROXBOX’s previous financial services provider, could keep pace.

That same need for speed extends across borders. ROXBOX works with international partners and team members as part of its regular operations, sourcing materials from overseas suppliers, paying international partners, and compensating staff based outside the U.S.

Traditional banks typically require in-person visits, phone calls, or multi-day processing to send money internationally, a mismatch for a company whose entire business model depends on moving faster than the market around it.

Mercury closes that gap by making international wires just as fast and simple as domestic ones, so sending money to a partner in Australia or staff in South America takes the same amount of effort as paying a vendor down the street. What’s more, ROXBOX can also pay a supplier in their local currency instead of routing everything through USD, seeing the live exchange rate before the payment goes out, with no added markup to account for. This means they have one less variable to manage in a supply chain that already spans multiple continents.

As ROXBOX has grown, so has the complexity of managing its finances. With Mercury, the company separates funds into sub-accounts for different departments, such as procurement, facilities, and vendors. This keeps spend organized by purpose and easier to track as the list of projects grows, while also making for a cleaner close at month end.

“Having those separate accounts allows us to keep money where we want it, and not overspend in certain areas,” Halsch said. “If you have one account that everyone can access, the money starts to flow too quickly in one direction. We’re able to get ahead of that with the separated accounts.”

That granular account structure also extends to permissions. To keep things secure, ROXBOX uses a mix of Mercury's pre-built roles and custom access to ensure the right level of permission for each individual — operations managers, for example, can move money between ROXBOX's own sub-accounts but can't send funds externally.

ROXBOX runs a large, active fleet of both IO credit and debit cards, named by person and by function, tied directly into its sub-account structure. The split between card types comes down to the employee and the job. Staff who travel and need to book a hotel or rent a car typically carry a credit card, while others working out of procurement, facilities, or QA/QC typically use debit.

Halsch and his team also extend cards to subcontractors who aren’t ROXBOX employees but work on-site during installs. This helps to ensure they have real-time visibility into project spend while reducing the overhead of dealing with reimbursements. “We give them a debit card or a credit card that we’re able to track and shut down accordingly as their projects start and stop,” Halsch says, noting that ROXBOX controls exactly what funds they can access, project by project.

Through using Mercury, ROXBOX is now able to:

• Move money across borders as easily as down the street by sending international wires to overseas partners and outsourced staff, paying in local currency when needed
• Keep spend sorted by purpose by running 27 sub-accounts organized by function instead of one shared account that made cash flow hard to track
• Track and control subcontractor spend by issuing named credit and debit cards tied to individual projects, turning them on and off as work starts and stops
• Keep the books current without extra tools by running Mercury integrated with QuickBooks for month-end close