Montana Statesman

Image: The Montana Statesman For a condo board on Florida's Gulf Coast, a leaking roof and a cracked balcony slab have usually meant two separate contractors. Two Northwest Florida companies are betting that customers would rather call one. Bel-Mac Roofing and Seashore Construction announced on Oct. 30 that they are combining under the Bel-Mac name, backed by a strategic investment from ACACIA Exterior Building Group of Alexandria, Va. The Montana Statesman ran the full announcement . Two companies, two specialties Bel-Mac was founded in 1995 and built its business on roofing. Seashore Construction, founded in 2005, worked on waterproofing, concrete repair, exterior restoration and construction. The combined company lists six service lines: Roofing Waterproofing and coatings Concrete repair and restoration Exterior cladding and siding Structural and framing work Building envelope rehabilitation and exterior construction Who the change is aimed at The companies name property...

Three Forks, Montana. Photo: Sagre via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 . Plenty of Montana businesses started with a family farm. Fewer can trace their start to a pineapple farm in Hawaii. Wheat Montana, the farm, mill and bakery near Three Forks, grew out of an idea Dean Folkvord had while touring one on Maui in the mid 1980s. A farm that needed fixing Dean and his father, Dale Folkvord, came from a Helena farming family. In 1978 they bought a farm near Three Forks with badly degraded soil, according to a profile in Montana Living. Dean had studied agriculture at Montana State University, where he learned about no-till farming, a method that leaves fields unplowed between crops to hold on to topsoil. They used it to bring the land back. Once the soil recovered, the Folkvords went looking for wheat with better yields and better baking qualities. They settled on hard white wheat, which carries nutrition close to whole wheat but looks and tastes closer to white flour. "I think...

Nvidia's headquarters in Santa Clara, California. Photo: Coolcaesar via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 . Nvidia is now one of the most valuable companies in the world, but its founding meetings took place over coffee in a San Jose diner. The company's story is useful less for the size of its success than for how close it came to failing early on. A booth at Denny's In 1993 Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem met at a Denny's in San Jose to talk about building a chip that would make computer graphics faster and more realistic, according to Nvidia's account of the meeting and reporting by CNBC. Nvidia lists its founding date as April 5, 1993, with a goal of bringing 3D graphics to gaming and multimedia. Huang told CBS's 60 Minutes, as reported by CNBC, that he had worked at the same restaurant as a busboy at 15. He was 30, married and a father of two when the three decided to start the company. "Frankly, I had no idea how to do it, nor did ...

The Saunders Building in downtown Bozeman. Photo: Tim Evanson via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0 . Ask people where enterprise software companies get built and most will name a coastal city. RightNow Technologies is the Montana answer to that assumption. Greg Gianforte founded the company in Bozeman in 1997, and over the next fourteen years it grew into a customer service software firm that Oracle agreed to buy for about $1.5 billion. Starting small, and staying put RightNow began without outside capital. The company built software that helped businesses answer customer questions, run help desks and manage service across email, web and phone. That kind of product later came to be called customer experience software, and RightNow sold it largely as a hosted service at a time when many companies still installed software on their own servers. Bootstrapping shaped the business. Without venture money behind it, the company had to sell to paying customers early and keep costs under con...