In December 2011, Don Nusbaum and Scott Duso, owners of D/N Excavating Inc., landed their first big job—site development for a new rental condominium project that included all utilities and roadwork. The timeframe was tight, just 10 months, and the two men faced a dilemma.
“We weren’t 100 percent sure that we could do the job as we were structured at the time,” Nusbaum says. “We either needed more people, or we needed the right technology.”
As luck would have it, Cat® dealer, Milton CAT, invited Nusbaum and Duso to a SITECH Northeast machine control and guidance demo around the same time. After seeing the full line-up of Trimble products in action, the partners realized it was precisely the kind of technology that could give them a competitive edge.
Nusbaum and Duso already owned a technology-ready Cat D5K dozer, which they quickly “turned on,” and also bought a base station and rover. It didn't take them long to adapt to using the new technology on the jobsite—or to begin seeing results.
“We saved at least 30 percent of our time on that job, maybe more,” Duso says. “I was able to grade 1,000 feet of dirt in a day with the system. Before, it would have taken four people helping me, and I couldn’t get half of that done.”
With the condo site development job completed on time and on budget, Nusbaum and Duso soon discovered new ways to put their technology to work—using the rover to measure elevation when laying pipe, for example—and eventually purchased an additional rover and base station. They also took delivery of an automation-ready Cat D6K2 and have plans to purchase a similarly equipped Cat excavator.
Thanks to the new technology, which allows them to tackle much larger projects, Nusbaum and Duso say D/N Excavating has more than doubled its gross sales in just two years.
“With the economy being in tough shape, bigger players have come down into the bidding of smaller jobs and we are coming up against them,” Duso says. “Technology has helped us hold our own against these much bigger companies. If we did not jump on machine control and guidance technology when we did, we were going to be left behind.”
