4x Growth in 3 Years: How Barricade Scaled with Assignar

I would need five more admins in my office, a larger office, larger overhead. I don’t know If we’d be where we’re at right now if we were still working with paper.

John Avendano | Business Manager

The Problem With Increasing Workloads

The Barricade Company provides traffic control services to construction zones in Las Vegas, Nevada. Site jobs involve laying out and picking up equipment, and a single crew member can hit 15-20 jobs daily, each with their own time card entry. Time cards were just a sheet of paper with 30 lines on it.

Using paper like this to keep up with Barricade’s rapid year-over-year growth meant more administrators for data entry, a large office, and significantly more time. Plus, in litigious Las Vegas, jotting critical information down on paper records was risky.

It was a lot to keep track of, and further growth would only make it worse.

A Customizable Solution

Since they have 40 employees, plus 20 subcontractors that tackle 90 to 100 traffic setups per day, they needed a customizable platform that could keep up with their high-volume needs.

With Assignar forms, Barricade could build what they needed to fit their team without bringing in IT or developers.

Growth Without the Paperwork

4x growth in 3 years

The Barricade company doubled their business in 2019 and again in 2022.

$150k saved each year

They no longer need to hire for data entry.

Scaled without mountains of paper

As they grew, paperwork didn’t grow with them.

“The forms are our liability mitigation. We work in traffic. There are car accidents all the time. Las Vegas, unfortunately, is a lawsuit city,” says Avendano, “Great paperwork is key.”

How digitization with Assignar helped Barricade quadruple in growth

No one likes driving through a construction zone—but it’s infinitely easier and safer when The Barricade Company is managing it.

Barricade provides traffic control services to construction zones in Las Vegas, Nevada and ensures worker and public safety with (you guessed it) barricades, cones, trench plates and flagger services.

The unique challenges of traffic safety in Las Vegas

Safety in Las Vegas presents a tough challenge, but the Barricade Company is good at what they do. In 2017, they doubled their business for the first time while still working exclusively with paper: field documents, compliance records, timesheets—you name it. That created a lot of challenges, said Faith Agnew, Project Manager at The Barricade Company.

Las Vegas is also a fairly litigious city. While it doesn’t top the list of lawsuit-laden cities in the U.S., it certainly tries. In the 2022 fiscal year, 78,661 civil lawsuits were filed in the Las Vegas Justice Court alone.

Agnew admitted that jotting critical information down on paper records wasn’t a reliable long-term solution.

“It was so much for one person to try to fill out on one piece of paper that it never was actually accurate,” Agnew said.

The team needed a way to keep meticulous records and call up specific information to fight erroneous lawsuits. Keeping paper records was putting their business at risk.

The niche-related software they adopted worked for a time, but they wanted to do more with it. They couldn’t customize it to their workflows without going through a developer. That made changes slow and costly—two things that aren’t conducive to scaling a business.

“You can’t trust a paper copy to be taken care of on a construction job site,” Agnew said. “[You can’t trust] that it doesn't get lost, that you don't spill coffee on it, that it doesn't get buried in the sand somewhere, stepped on, and covered in dirt, and become illegible.”

John Avendano, Business Manager at Barricade, knew they needed software that could work with them instead of software they had to work around.

“Customization was key,” Avendano said. Which is why forms were a huge draw for the team.

“It works how our workflow does,” Avendano said. “Being able to customize it and being able to modify certain workflows inside [Assignar] was paramount.”

Assignar has saved the team $150,000 a year in staffing costs alone. They would have had to hire four to five administrative staff if they were still doing everything on paper.

Avoid lawsuits with airtight data collection

The key to winning frivolous lawsuits is backing up what you’re saying with data. Using Assignar, the Barricade team had no trouble doing that.

Paper makes it easy for data to get lost. Now, when lawyers wait two years and 11 months to file (just before the 3-year statute of limitations ends), Barricade can pull up the documentation with just a few clicks using Assignar.

Plus, Avendano says it gives them a lot more credibility.

“I don’t think we’ve ever had the proof we’ve sent via Assignar questioned,” he said.

Scale with systems that support you, not ones that hold you back

With Assignar, there’s no more back and forth to the office, dropping off timesheets and job packets. There’s no need to hire full-time staff to sort through papers. It runs faster and has fewer roadblocks—key aspects needed to scale operations successfully.

“The quicker we can react to the data we’re receiving, the faster we can get it, the more accurate it is, and the more successful we can be,” said Avendano

The Barricade team makes faster decisions and scales without added costs. They estimate that that’s easily saved them $150,000 a year.

If they stuck with paper, scaling would still be possible, but Avendano thinks it would be a nightmare.

“The evolution of scale and being able to double back-to-back year-over-year—that would definitely slow down. We’d have to solve some much more challenging problems,” Avendano said.