Building a Digital Channel From Zero

A Nasdaq-listed construction technology company had 400+ branches and no digital rental channel. Every rental request ran through a phone call or a branch visit. No online path from browse to book, no data on what customers wanted before they called, and not a single identified customer email anywhere in the business. Revenue from digital was $0.

I owned the strategy, the build, and the operations behind it: not just the storefront, but everything underneath it. That meant designing customer onboarding from scratch, the sign-up flow and the credit and insurance-paperwork steps customers had never been able to finish online before, and connecting the outside systems that make a real sale possible. It went live in January 2024.

Signing customers up, tied to renting, sign-up, and credit, turned the business into something that fed itself. Past a point it stopped needing a push: 4,562 new accounts in a year (up 328%) tipped it over, and accounts came to drive 80% of online orders while the sign-up system built the company's first real customer list from nothing.

What I owned:

• The strategy and the roadmap, from the first wireframe to the growth program that followed.
• The architecture, the in-house team, and the external engineering partner, on a $1.2M annual delivery budget.
• Customer onboarding and the operational loop behind it: structured credit applications that replaced forms and PDFs, compliance checks embedded in underwriting, and the internal inbox that let a small team review 600 applications a month.
• Self-service for account holders: apply for and manage credit, extend or off-rent equipment, request service, and pay by saved card.
• The company's online presence, from search and content to a $150K a year paid budget, covered in No. 04 below.

I ran the company's whole online presence end to end: how it showed up in search, the content behind it, and a $150K a year search-ad budget alongside, building the kind of visibility a company needs heading into going public. AI did real work here too, helping grow the traffic and what we understood about it.

In 2024, a Fortune 500 energy company that had never heard of the business found it through that online presence and the experience behind it. That first contact became a $100M a year customer. No cold call, no chasing a bid: the website made the introduction, and the experience earned the trust.

This is the pattern I repeat: find the thing that doesn't exist yet, build the version people actually use (not just launch it), push it past the tipping point, and leave behind something that runs without me in the room. It's the same instinct that shaped my work on Missouri's pension governance and insurance modernization: take something fragile or nonexistent and make it durable.