Sam Knight was president and co-founder of BOLT Software, a project management and scheduling software for the construction trades that build residential homes. Sam moved to Dallas with his family in his teens and attended Texas A&M for several years before venturing out to the working world to feed his entrepreneurial passions. Sam helped lead the BOLT team as it grew before the company was sold and now he guides the BOLT product in the larger company.

The BOLT Software company was created in 2015 after years of internal use at a large Dallas-based electrical contractor. Founder Josh Causey brought in Sam Knight to spin out and run BOLT as a separate software company to grow the customer base and improve the product. Through 2020, the company grew to over $1M in recurring revenues before it was acquired in 2020 by Fort Worth-based ECI Solutions to expand its construction software offering.

Built by the trades for the trades, BOLT is a SaaS solution that simplifies project management, scheduling, and estimating for new home construction subcontractors (electricians, painters, plumbers, etc.). BOLT helps those subcontractors truly manage their teams: from rescheduling due to unforeseen delays to scheduling out multiple crews simultaneously.

In this episode, Sam tells the story of how BOLT was created for internal use before it became a startup company on its own, how they found a focus selling to unserved trades businesses, how they kept expanding and selling, and how BOLT was eventually acquired by ECI Solutions while it was still a growing company.