How better to get an edge in an old-economy business than with new-economy tools. Rainier Asphalt & Concrete was founded by my brother Tom in 2000. It has steadily grown to generate more than $4 million in annual revenues and withstood the furor of the Great Recession. Tom invited me to manage finance and IT in 2007.  We’ve experimented with many IT products and credit some with helping us efficiently serve our customers and manage our portfolio of work.

We’re going to discuss many of our successes with technology in this blog. We’re especially going to highlight our home-grown bid management system, which we will open to fellow specialty contractors in 2015. We explored many off-the-shelf solutions to help us run Rainier Asphalt & Concrete. We repeatedly found them either too expensive or not developed with the specialty contractor in mind.

If you’re like us, the phone’s already ringing. Traditional marketing and word of mouth bring in lots of opportunities. The challenge is figuring out how to separate serious customers from the looky-loos and developing a system to manage bids from request through paid-in-full.

We hope you find value in this blog, invite your comments and would appreciate you sharing us with your professional colleagues.

Sincerely,
Adrian Merry