Matthew Bullis grew up in a mud-brick hut with no running water on a small island off South Korea, was adopted to the US at 11 speaking no English. After a dot-com near-miss, he took over his brother's struggling concrete-pumping software — down to about $20,000 a year — for 90% of the company. He taught himself to code and rebuilt it from scratch.
From 2016, Bullis built RapidWorks into the operational system of record for heavy-equipment subcontractors: concrete pumping, cranes, hydrovac, and other site services. RapidWorks helps contractors book jobs, dispatch crews, manage the field, and get paid faster with accuracy and speed, taking dispatchers' productivity from 20 jobs to 60+. Today the company is near $20 million in ARR, serving more than 80% of the concrete-pumping market.
In 2023, approaching $5 million in revenue, Bullis sold a majority to Wavecrest Growth Partners and brought in a new CEO Tim Curran with a new executive team. Matthew expected to be phased out within a year. Instead, by staying flexible and solving whatever broke, he became indispensable as chief strategy officer, taking on important strategic execution roles across the company where he was needed.
Key Takeaways
- Solve any problem — A bootstrapper's real value is surviving anything and solving whatever breaks.
- Stay flexible — Don't trade on past wins; credibility comes from the value you create now.
- Sit with customers — Weeks in their offices surfaced problems they never thought to ask for.
- Hire your boss — A ready-made CEO and team de-risk the scale a founder can't reach alone.
- Keep perspective — Nothing is as good or as bad as it feels in the moment.
Quote from Matthew Bullis, Co-Founder and CSO of RapidWorks
"To stay useful and relevant when you're not the CEO any more, you have to be flexible. People overemphasize the value of what they've done in the past: look at all the great things I did. But that's like living in your high school glory days. It doesn't merit much, and you can't expect people to give you credibility just for what you built.
"Your real value is surviving anything and solving any problems. Take that to heart — I can survive anything, I can solve any problem, I can create value for myself and the people around me. Under any difficult situation, people are drawn to people of value.
"So I stopped staying quiet. When I saw things weren't done right, I spoke up, and the seasoned leadership saw my opinions had value. When people see value in you, and you really help, they want you on their team — that's how I won the other executives over."
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