Boom and Bucket — Q&A with COO & Co-Founder
It’s still early days in construction tech and the number of serial entrepreneurs in our industry remains pretty small. Aaron Kline is one of those elusive serial entrepreneurs. He knows what it takes to create a software start-up in a notoriously under-digitized industry and he drives a mission oriented culture that’s anchored in his Navy experience.
Boom and Bucket is aiming to disrupt the secondary heavy machinery market with a focus on “trust, technology, and service.” The team that Aaron’s helped build has deep construction expertise along with technology expertise that’s becoming more and more in demand.
You spent over a decade in the U.S. Navy as an F-18 fighter pilot and instructor. Which Top Gun quote resonates with you most? Perhaps more importantly, how has that career experience helped you running a start-up?
My favorite Top Gun quote has to be a toss up between “Because I was inverted” and “No points for second place.” There’s actually a fine jar for quoting the movie at the real school — drop a quote and you have to pay five dollars — but sometimes the situation is so perfect you just do it anyway and pay the fine.
Top Gun’s a fun movie, but there are some aspects of the community that it didn’t get right. One of those things is its portrayal of aviators’ relationships and attitudes toward each other as a bunch of egotistical jerks. The reality is that the people I flew with were incredibly professional and some of my lifelong friends.
That drive for excellence while maintaining high esprit was one of my biggest takeaways from the world of Naval Aviation. Start-ups can be pretty stressful places to work — there are weeks when you’re behind on goals and it seems like nothing you’re doing is working, and other weeks where everything just clicks.
Keeping your team focused on the mission and the company’s impact for your customers helps navigate that rollercoaster ride, because start-ups are also great places to learn and grow.
Between Yard Club and now Boom and Bucket, you’ve been all-in on construction equipment. What interested you in heavy machinery?
I was a mechanical engineer by training before joining the Navy, so I’ve always been fascinated by machinery. There are actually quite a few similarities between equipment divisions and an aircraft maintenance department — managing a squadron of fighters is just equipment management in a different context.
Many veterans also find their way into construction and heavy machinery, so I feel right at home talking with the men and women in this industry and it’s personally rewarding to keep serving them.
Plus, this stuff is fun! My inner eight-year-old gets just as excited to walk onto a yard full of dozers as he did walking onto a flight line.
In a lot of ways, equipment represents some of the most advanced tech on a jobsite, but there’s still a lot of ground left to cover in terms of user adoption of digital tools. What do you see as some of the biggest hurdles in the equipment industry and surrounding markets?
While I agree that the industry has technology adoption hurdles to overcome, the technologist in me views those hurdles as opportunities to build valuable tools.
One of my lessons learned from the Yard Club experience was that the equipment industry actually has a healthy appetite for good technology solutions, but those solutions have to be designed with empathy for the end user. You can’t build a product in this space assuming that users have the latest and greatest hardware, or that they will always have access to a high speed data connection. Usability and intuitive design are really important.
Modern technology tools shouldn’t require hours of instruction to learn — did a champion teach you how to use Instagram or Uber? There’s a huge opportunity to serve the small and medium-sized contractors that don’t have dedicated IT departments with scalable, intuitive solutions.
On that note, can you discuss a bit more about your founding team’s vision and direction with Boom and Bucket?
Our long-term vision is to be the most trusted marketplace for used construction equipment. We talk a lot about trust, technology, and service because one of our lessons learned from Yard Club is that technology is not a silver bullet for this industry. You need to have a strong service component.
The mountain we are trying to climb in this industry is trust. The used construction trade is very opaque. It’s very local. It’s not very information-rich. And good luck trying to sell a machine without somebody flying out to take a look at it.
That’s the mountain we’re trying to climb. That’s why we do full inspections and videos, and we’re going to start aggregating telematics data. We pull in oil sample history, we pull in maintenance data. All of that stuff.
That said, one of the opportunities we’re most excited about at Boom and Bucket is the evolving integration of operational, market, and financial data. After working on telematics and connectivity at Caterpillar, I’m particularly excited about advanced operations management software for mixed fleets.
All of this operational data — telematics data like utilization, fuel consumption and fault codes, plus maintenance records and operating conditions — helps equipment owners to better manage their fleet and to realize greater downstream value for their machines.
At Boom and Bucket, we’ve already seen early signs of price lift for machines with comprehensive operational records. This reward to owners with good records creates a flywheel that incentivizes further adoption of operational technology.
Finally, it seems like every week I see one or two new hires at Boom and Bucket. You guys have built a team pretty rapidly this last year. What’s the secret to building a good start-up team in construction?
I’d love to take credit for building our team, but the truth is I have two incredible co-founders at Boom and Bucket that have ridiculously strong track records. One of the best parts of working with two other experienced founders is that we share a common vision of success and what it takes to get there.
Building a great team is our top priority. I’ll offer three lessons learned in building great teams in this space, the first two of which are not unique to construction tech companies.
- Lead with values. My partners and I ironed out our values for the company within the first month of working together because we are so passionate about building a values-driven organization. Every candidate for one of our roles gets a look at this after their first interview because these values are so foundational to who we are as a team. Not everyone who reads our values gets excited about them, and that’s okay, because we know that the people who do are the type of people we want to work with.
- Be selective. One of the benefits of leading your own company is choosing who to work with. Some founders view this as an opportunity to hire their friends, but we view it as an opportunity to recruit the best possible people to our cause. We screen on average around 200 applicants before extending an offer of employment at Boom and Bucket. Recruiting top performers is even harder because their employers are fighting hard to keep them, but the rewards of working on a team of A+ players are well worth it.
- Screen for industry passion. Our team is very multi-disciplinary — world-class software developers, growth marketing experts, and machinery sales professionals working in the field — so we necessarily have to recruit from other industries to build the caliber of team we want. But everyone at Boom and Bucket shares a common vision for what we can do for this industry and a desire to serve the men and women who build our world. Some of our team came directly from the industry, but others may have a relative in construction or worked for a contractor during college. We value excitement for our mission and motivation to build something great for our customers.
Adam, Samir and I spend a huge amount of our time on recruiting — it’s one of the highest leverage activities as a leader of an early-stage company.
Nate Fuller is Managing Director of Placer Construction Solutions, advising leadership teams to transform their organizations in ways that improve performance and agility at the field level.
He provides construction companies with a field assessment that delivers transformative information about their field operations and is proven to accelerate innovation & technology adoption for Top ENR contractors.
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