This week, Buildertrend announced that it had hired its 500th employee. This is a tremendous achievement for the company. Buildertrend provides cloud-based software to home builders, re-modelers, and other construction related companies. It is the largest provider of this type of software in the United States. The company currently has more than one million users across fifty-eight countries.
The company was founded thirteen years ago by Jeff & Steve Dugger and Dan Houghton. Since its inception, the company has moved beyond software for new home builders to include landscapers, commercial construction companies, architects, and other construction related users. This has allowed the company to build a strong platform with diverse users that helps make the company less susceptible to market fluctuations. 
Its growth also means that the company is always on the lookout for new talent. The company expects to continue growing and hiring – particularly software related jobs – such as QA, development, architecture, and data scientists. Over the last thirteen years, the company described their ability to hire top people as the key to their success – particularly finding people in Omaha and Lincoln and fortuitously finding people boomeranging back to the area.
Over the course of its decade long run, the company has achieved significant, repeatable growth. In a press release the company provided insight into its current growth, “As one of the largest privately held technology companies within the Silicon Prairie, Buildertrend has celebrated 50% year-over-year growth for nearly the past decade.”
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The company has had particularly strong growth over the last two years, with employee growth of more than 55% in 2018 and 2019. In the press release, Dan Houghton, the co-founder and Executive Vice President of the company stated: “Every day, we strive to create a work environment that measures up to our internal motto ‘life is better at Buildertrend,’ where employees feel valued, rewarded, and empowered to take on new opportunities, with a company commitment to promoting from within.”
The company’s core platform is one of the first and largest built on Google Cloud Platform, or GCP. This has led Buildertrend to be a thought-leader regarding design and architecture on this cloud structure.
It also means that promoting from within is critical to the success of the company. “More than 60% of employees have been promoted or taken on a new role,” said Megan Maslanka, Vice President of Human Resources. In particular, she pointed to the need for key technologists that are comfortable in GCP and have backgrounds in system architecture, system infrastructure, and other IT heavy expertise. Ms. Maslanka also stated, “Buildertrend continues to expand its customer set.” And this means that, “the company is seeking new developers that have a variety of product and development capabilities to meet the needs of these customers.”
Buildertrend’s impressive growth has been done with virtually no outside capital. In a world that values, venture capital raises and announcements about the “next round”. Buildertrend has quietly gone about building one of the best companies in the region. Houghton credits the people. “Buildtrend’s impressive growth and recognition as Omaha’s #1 best place to work is a direct result of the dedication and commitment of and to our team – all 500 of them.”
Buildertrend’s unique and rewarding culture has not only helped it to attract top talent but has also earned the company local and national accolades. Earlier this year, Buildertrend was awarded by Baird Holm LLP as the #1 Best Place to Work in Omaha for companies with 200 or more employees and was recognized as a finalist for the 2019 North America Employee Engagement Awards.
“During my tenure at Buildertrend, I’ve grown as a professional and as a person. The company provides constant opportunity for growth, and I’ve been able to experience a variety of positions while working in an environment that’s exciting, challenging and rewarding,” said Tayler Ross, who started working at Buildertrend in 2016 as a customer success manager and is now a senior manager in the customer success department. “Being a part of Buildertrend’s success and watching our team grow has been one of the most exciting parts of working here. The people make coming to work every day a joy, and I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else at this stage in my career. I can’t wait to see what we do next together.”
The company is currently hiring top talent to fill positions within its sales, software development and customer success teams. To learn more about available career opportunities at Buildertrend, visit https://buildertrend.com/careers/.
SPN has written a number of articles – chronicling the rise of Buildertrend. For more information about the creation and early days of Buildertrend – check out these fun ones:
https://spnewsnjt.wpengine.com/2010/02/buildertrend-named-constructech-top-product-for-second-year/ – written by Dusty Davidson, founder of SPN and current Flywheel CEO.
https://spnewsnjt.wpengine.com/2012/01/buildertrend-weathers-hit-to-housing-market-reaps-rewards/ – written by the SPN team showing the company’s resiliency and how companies often have to weather difficult things outside of their control.
https://spnewsnjt.wpengine.com/2014/10/startup-grown-buildertrend-moves-two-story-office/ – one of our favorites because it only took the company about two years to outgrow the swanky digs featured in the article.
In short, SPN exists to tell these stories. We have written more than fifteen articles across the last decade about Buildertrend or that included them in the story. While we did not participate in the growth, we chronicled it, and we are particularly proud to tell the stories of Prairie founders.
We want to talk about startups before they are hiring their 500th employee. Please help us by sending us (editor@siliconprairienews.com) interesting stories from your company or your neck of the Prairie. Congratulations to Buildertrend on hiring their 500th employee.
