BigRBRidge

engineered and generally they have a lot of compati-

bility,” says Klein. “So, if we’re doing an MSE wall, or

a sound wall, those products might be involved with a

bridge project. We generally try to stay with stuff that

we can engineer and manufacture so our sales guys

are talking to the same, ultimate, end-user customer.”

Big R contracts those customers in a variety of ways.

“In established markets where we’ve been operating

for 45 years, it’s more word of mouth,” Klein explains,

“but in newer markets, we attend a lot of trade shows.

And we work with a lot of engineering consultants to

pre-design and come up with bridge solutions that

they can supply to a city or a county as a conceptual

design, and the city or the county will put it out to bid.

So we work a lot on the specification side, too, outside

of trade shows.”

By the time Big R Bridge hits the half-century mark,

Klein would like his company to be “the top market

leader in prefabricated steel infrastructure products

while growing the breadth of the types of bridges we

build.” He also foresees “looking for acquisitions of

complementary products that fit our model - products

that we would engineer and manufacture that our

main sales team could sell to our current customers

and add on to what they’re already selling, while stay-

ing close to our expertise of steel infrastructure prod-

ucts.”

From its beginnings as a farm and ranch store, Big R

Bridge has matured into a modern, ambitious, and en-

trepreneurial company that its CEO maintains is still

trying to grow “aggressively but smartly.” It recently

acquired the company that used to manufacture the

steel reinforcement for its MSE walls, in order to bet-

ter control production and shorten lead times. It also

brought in new, automated CNC (Computer Numerical

Control) processing equipment for its bridge-making

plants.

logistics