INDUSTRIES

Excavating Company Doubles Sales with the Help of Cat® Technology

When Don Nusbaum and Scott Duso launched D/N Excavating Inc., they took a leap of faith—bidding on a big site prep job they weren’t quite sure they could handle.

The good news is they won the business. The bad news is they didn’t have the resources to meet the tight deadline.

As luck would have it, their Cat^® dealer invited them to a demonstration of machine control and guidance technologies for construction equipment. After seeing what Cat technology could do, the partners sprang into action.

They already owned a technology-ready Cat dozer which they quickly “turned on.” Then they bought additional surveying equipment including a GPS base station and rover. Learning to use the new technology was easy, and soon Duso was grading 1,000 feet of dirt per day.

“Before, I couldn’t get half of that done,” he says, “and it would have taken four people helping me.”

Duso says they finished the big job at least 30 percent faster than they would have if they had not purchased the technology. After completing the project on time and within budget, the partners looked for other ways to leverage their investment—using the rover, for example, to measure elevation when laying pipe. Soon they bought a second rover and base station, plus another automation-ready dozer. A similarly equipped excavator will be their next purchase.

Thanks to all the new technology, D/N Excavating has been able to compete for larger projects, and as a result they’ve more than doubled gross sales in just two years.

“With the economy being in tough shape, bigger players are bidding smaller jobs and we’re coming up against them,” Duso says. “Technology has helped us hold our own against much bigger companies. If we hadn’t jumped on machine control and guidance technology when we did, we would have been left behind.”