After a long and successful career, Jay Haladay, Viewpoint Construction Software‘s CEO and chairman of the board, announced his retirement last week.

Haladay, 65, said the demands of the job, with long hours and a heavy travel schedule, will continue to increase, so he’s decided to step down while remaining on the board of directors.

Viewpoint has grown tremendously since Haladay bought the company 27 years ago after running it for about three years. From a local firm with about 50 employees to a global company with close to 800 employees today, he said, Viewpoint will continue to grow, not just here, but around the world.

“Construction is a global business, even more than 20 or 30 years ago,” he said. “We now have customers in 26 countries and it’s important that we are considered a global brand.”

That global reach started in Canada about 10 years ago when Viewpoint was asked to develop software for American companies doing work there. The laws and requirements are different in Canada, of course, but eventually led to Viewpoint’s expansion into Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.

“We made modifications to serve Canada, and once you do it for one British Commonwealth country it becomes easier,” Haladay said.

Haladay said his company has gotten a lot of assistance from Bain Capital, which has helped it expand.

“A private equity company is a very important source of not only capital for expansion, but also a lot of management guidance and expertise,” he said.

About a year ago, Bain bought out two other private equity groups invested in Viewpoint.

“They are much better positioned with companies they think will be a market leader,” Haladay said.” So they made a rational decision to be Viewpoint’s sole partner.”

Bain Capital grew out of Bain Consulting, Haladay said, and helps Viewpoint with best business practices.

“It’s always useful to have access to people who have ‘been there, done that,’ and Bain Capital is one of the top five or six in the world,” he said.

Bain’s expertise will help in choosing the next CEO for Viewpoint, Haladay said, and he will also have a hand in choosing his successor, by either promoting from within or doing a global search.

Whatever happens, Viewpoint will remain a family business. Haladay’s daughter is a meteorologist for a wind energy company, but his three sons all work for the company.

“The business reflects our family values and personalities,” he said. “They will have every opportunity to reinvent (Viewpoint), but whether they stay is up to them.”

Carrying family values into the workplace is just one reason Viewpoint has been so successful, Haladay said.

“If I had to look back at three or four elements that made me successful, I would say to find good people and give them a lot of rope,” he said. “You can’t micromanage them and I’ve delegated a lot to them.

“I’ve also opened my eyes to a lot of different markets and while some think of construction as dull, I’ve been able to look at our market in a unique way, been able to grow meaningfully in an area underserved by technology, and reached out to get information on things I don’t know about,” he said.

Keeping his personal life simple has been important to his success, Haladay said, and his wife has been an essential partner.

“My wife of 41 years has been incredibly supportive of what I’ve done,” he said. “We have a very strong relationship and I don’t know if I could have done it without a strong relationship with her. I can’t imagine doing what I’ve done if my personal life was a mess.”

Giving his personal life a higher priority is the reason he’s retiring, Haladay said.

“Over the last 15 years, I can’t think of more than four or five days where I haven’t thought about business,” he said. “Any successful business owner is crazy if they say they leave work at the office.”

Running Viewpoint and watching it grow has still been “a helluva lot of fun,” Haladay said, but now it’s time to reorder priorities and put his family first.

With a home on a golf course in Hawaii and another near a ski resort in Canada, the Haladays have plenty of options on how to spend their retirement.

“I want to play more golf and we are all avid skiers and snowboarders,” he said. “I’ve also ridden in Cycle Oregon and want to get back to more cycling.”

They also plan to travel a lot more. For his 65^th birthday, Renee Haladay gave her husband a ticket to the British Open in July, and that’s just for starters.

“In the fall we’re going to Iceland to see the northern lights,” he said. “And I’ve always wanted to see the Galapagos (Islands), so we will be doing that next year.”

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Technology upstart Viewpoint Construction Software announced Tuesday that Bain Capital will invest $230 million into the company by the end of the week.

The deal has been in the works since October as Viewpoint looked to expand its reach into the global construction software market, said Jay Haladay, Viewpoint’s chairman and CEO.

“By any measure, it is a large investment,” he said.

Demand for greater construction technology is fueling the company’s revenues, which were $19 million in 2009 and are projected to be $140 million in 2014, according to Haladay.

“We’re going to be a much larger business three or four years out, and the construction market is compatible with us being a much larger business,” he said.

The investment by Bain Capital, a private firm with holdings in companies as varied as The Weather Channel, LinkedIn and SurveyMonkey, is expected to increase Viewpoint’s growth potential in the next three or four years. The next step, Haladay said, will be for the company to go public.

“What we’re saying is Bain is investing in our business, but they expect to invest more in our growth,” he said. “This is just the starting point.”

In July 2012, global private equity firm TA Associates invested $76 million in Viewpoint, then known as Coaxis Inc. The company also received $10 million from Updata Partners in 2010.

Eighteen months ago, Haladay had thought future growth would come from one of his company’s current investors. But the company’s growth had him reconsider, he said.

Updata Partners typically invests in companies in early stages, and has an investment capacity of between $10 million and $25 million, Haladay said. TA Associates typically invests between $50 million and $125 million. Bain has a minimum investment of $200 million.

Both companies are selling their interest to Bain as part of the deal, Haladay said.

“It’s a little like having banking relationships,” he said. “As you grow, your needs of your financial institutions change.”

The time frame for Viewpoint to go public, Haladay said, will depend on the markets and the company’s ability to create a predictable business model, he said.

“The important thing about our relationship with Bain is that they are aligned very similarly to us,” he said. “We don’t have a predetermined time frame. It could be a year. It could be three years.”

Most of Viewpoint’s growth is expected to come from its building information modeling software products. The industry is going through a paradigm shift that parallels what happened in the auto industry around the time of the Model T, Haladay said.

“We are right at the threshold of being an industry that goes through a lot of automation,” he said. “Construction is going to go through that same kind of revamping over the course of the next 15 to 25 years. We have positioned ourselves to be very relevant in that conversation.”

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When Viewpoint Construction Software‘s top executives heard Portland General Electric was considering plans to demolish the Hawthorne Building on Water Avenue three years ago, they took note.

Viewpoint CEO Jay Haladay and Jeff Reaves, the company’s director of global real estate, saw a business opportunity. Take the empty shell of an historic building and transform it into a creative industrial office space for a company in expansion mode.

For Viewpoint, which plans to move about 150 employees into the building by November, the building will fit the kind of environment that the company’s “knowledge” workers desire, he said.

“There’s a growing awareness that there’s a connection between the facilities an organization uses and who and what they are,” Haladay said. “My feeling is that we are the industries of the new century, not the industries of the 1800s. That helps us make the decisions of what kind of facilities we use.”

The 1909-built building, which is being called the 1510 Technology Center, had significant levels of contamination from decades of use as a maintenance and machine shop for PGE.

“Jay, myself, and other developers went to PGE and said, ‘Don’t tear this down because it does have value,'” said Reaves, a former architect and manager at then-Group Mackenzie. The firm, which now goes by the name Mackenzie, designed the renovation project.

The two-story, 60,000-square-foot building is located across the street from Viewpoint’s global headquarters at the RiverEast Center just south of the Hawthorne Bridge. Viewpoint, moved to the Central Eastside District in 2005, when the company was called Coaxis.

The building had just the right amount of grit, history and unique elements to be an ideal location for Viewpoint’s expansion plans. Some elements include vast concrete floorings, prominent cement columns and significant window space that bring light into both floors of the building, Haladay said.

“We’re getting a shell of a building,” Haladay said. “It has unique industrial looks to it, but it doesn’t have any software components.”

PGE listened to the calls for preserving the building, eventually agreeing to sell the building to Vancouver, Wash.-based developer Killian Pacific. As part of the sale, PGE agreed to voluntarily clean up the contaminants, according to documents filed with the Oregon Public Utility Commission.

Highly toxic polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), which were widely used as a coolant in transformers, were spilled on the floors over the years, according to the PUC.

“PGE has been very upfront and cooperative throughout this whole process,” Haladay said. “Everybody recognized that it had some environmental challenges.”

PGE’s decontamination work is nearly finished on the building, which has been vacant a year. Its contractor, Missoula, Mt.-based Envirocon Inc., has removed the top two inches of the concrete slab, said Adam Tyler, design and development manager for Killian Pacific.

The scope of work for Killian’s general contractor, Camas, Wash.-based Robertson & Olson Construction Inc., includes installing hydronic piping through the building’s all-concrete floors, which will be used for radiant heating and cooling from the slab, Tyler said. Robertson & Olson also will install new mechanical, electrical and plumbing fixtures in the building; replace an old gabled roof; and install new windows that retain the historic look of the old ones.

Old growth Douglas fir lumber will be salvaged from the rooftop and reused as part of the interior design elements, including ceilings, walls and finishes, Tyler said.

“We love it because of the open space and the exposed concrete,” he said. “(Viewpoint) likes the authentic character of the space and the columns. The ratio of window to walls is phenomenal.”

The developer will seek platinum LEED certification on the project, which will cost $4.5 million, according to building permits. Once completed, Viewpoint will lease the building from Killian Pacific.

“The biggest challenge of the project is timing and environmental issues,” Tyler said. “PGE stepped up in a big way. They didn’t want to demolish the building. This will probably be the cleanest building in the Central Eastside when it is done.”

The central two floors of the 1510 Technology Center also will have a free and open design, similar to the Viewpoint headquarters offices at RiverEast. The design will cater to a mix of creative types with collaborative spaces, including special workspaces called agile scrum rooms that create cohesion; a space for games such as Wii, shuffleboard, and billiards; and WebEx conferencing rooms. Each of the two floors will have room for about 100 work spaces, giving the building the ability to expand as the company moves ahead with plans to increase Portland staff from 250 to 500 by the end of 2015, Haladay said.

The basement of the building, which PGE once used for deliveries from horse and buggy, will have abundant bike storage, an employee lounge and showers.

As part of the renovation, Killian Pacific also will install wiring and plumbing needed for leasing space to at least two food carts, which would be parked out front of the building.

Public transportation options also will be abundant. The building will be easily accessible by bus, streetcar and light rail by the time the Portland-Milwaukie Light Rail Bridge is completed by September of next year, Reaves said.

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Just weeks after acquiring a Florida-based technology company, Portland-based Viewpoint Construction Software has acquired a software company in the United Kingdom.

4Projects, based in Sunderland, England, provides building information modeling collaboration software.

As part of the acquisition, Viewpoint picked up 61 new employees – bringing the company’s total headcount to approximately 400 people – as well as 41,000 unique monthly European users.

Viewpoint CEO Jay Haladay said the acquisition will give the company a technological and geographical foothold. Viewpoint’s software focuses on recordkeeping aspects of construction, including job costing, accounting, project timelines and labor pay. 4Project, meanwhile, provides methods for communicating information to the various stakeholders of a project.

“There are a lot of dynamics in a construction project that have to be passed through all these different stakeholders during construction,” Haladay said. “We always felt that tying the granular data that we capture and collaborating that through a construction network would be a very powerful combination.”

Haladay said the acquisition will help expand 4Projects’ distribution in North America, and conversely will give Viewpoint a presence in Europe, theMiddle East and beyond. Viewpoint did not release the financial details of the purchase.

This is Viewpoint’s third acquisition in the past seven months. In May, the company acquired North Carolina-based Construction Imaging Systems. Last month it purchased Florida-based ACS Connect.

“[The acquisitions] were very much part of a strategic road map we put together several years back, and we’re executing against that strategic road map,” Haladay said.

Viewpoint reported approximately $40 million in revenue in 2011, which represented a 47 percent increase from 2010. The company has not yet released final revenue numbers for 2012.

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Coaxis Inc., the parent company of , has brought yet another company into its fold.

The Portland-based provider of construction project management software announced, Wednesday, it has acquired for an undisclosed amount Bandon, Florida-based , a 27-year-old mobile solutions provider. The acquisition follows a recent partnership between the two companies in August that resulted in the launch of a Mobile Field Manager for Viewpoint’s products.

Jay Haladay, Viewpoint’s CEO, said the acquisition will catapult mobile applications for the rest of its services. The mobile technology allows construction workers in the field to tally things like payroll and equipment usage with iOS or Android devices, and have that information sink directly with company databases.

The announcement follows Coaxis’ acquisition in May of North Carolina-based Construction Imaging Systems, and news in July that it had received a $76 million minority investment from a global private equity firm to help expand product development.

While exact figures were not available, the company reported that revenues in the third quarter of 2012 had increased 50 percent over a year ago. In 2011, Viewpoint reported approximately $40 million in revenue – a 47 percent increase from 2010.

With the introduction of ACS, Viewpoint adds 11 employees to its roster, bringing its base to more than 235 people. Haladay said the company has also been working hard to grow its Australian and New Zealand presence; his oldest son Scott Haladay was recently appointed the managing director for those foreign markets.

Haladay attributes Viewpoint’s growth, in part, to a trend among contractors that are making strategic use of the economic downturn to create efficiencies in operations.

“This may have been a little sharper than the average downturn but (contractors) have learned that if they’re going to see the upturn they need to be efficient and often times they use these downturns as an opportunity to hone their efficiencies,” Haladay said. “It’s given them time to reflect on technological infrastructure and partnerships.”

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