Our Story
Where it began
After returning home from serving a full time mission for his Church, Preston Arnoldsen was hired on as a laborer with one of the largest producing commercial concrete company in the State of Utah. He started in the construction yard where he loaded trailers and prepared equipment for the company’s foremen. There Preston got familiar with things like simon forms, power trowels, flat ties, base ties, etc.
Pretty soon he was assigned to a crew that was led by a foreman named Rafael (Rafa for short). He would later learn that Rafa’s crew was the top flat work crew in the company. Almost every day they would pour fifty cubic yards of concrete (or more) and most of the time it was a hard finish slab—meaning the finish looked glassy like a Costco floor.
There wasn’t a lot of English spoken on Rafa’s crew but Preston knew he was learning from some of the best finishers in the industry. The culture of their crew was comparable to the gears of a clock. While it took him a while to learn how to do things like pull a rake and how to NOT roll an edge, his “primos” taught him with precision and would quickly correct his mistakes.
When it was “go time” it was GO TIME and when it was time for a five minute breather, everybody would take the break at the same time. Preston grew close with those guys and still keeps in touch with a few of them.
Pouring commercial concrete was the beginning of his construction journey and “I’m grateful for that,” Preston says, “because I learned that if you can keep up in the mud, other trades don’t seem as demanding.”
On to carpentry, school, horses, and leather
From concrete, Preston went to carpentry. He built custom decks and finished basements with a local general contractor. During this time he was exposed to a lot more of the thinking process that goes behind planning for and carrying out a construction project. He learned how to apply the principles and formulas of geometry and trigonometry.
Over the next several years he took a break from full time work in the construction industry and instead he spent some time in school and pursuing his passions for horse training and leatherwork. He never quit doing side jobs and was always working on something with his hands.
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A mentor and a mag
After a couple of years Preston was helping a friend with a concrete job on the side when he met a seasoned finisher name Mike. Mike had been finishing residential concrete for nearly fifty years at that time and he was still going strong. Preston started finishing jobs with him on the side and he became a mentor to him. For the next three years Preston would learn tricks of the trade that only someone who had raked as many miles of mud as Mike could know. Eventually it was Mike and a few other close friends that encouraged him to consider pursuing concrete and construction as a general contractor.
“It wasn’t easy to think of the name we ended up choosing for this business.” Preston says, “Everything we could think of was already taken or just didn’t quite fit. One day I was climbing up a window well of a basement that I had just finished with Mike. As I was climbing, I looked at my magnesium trowel and noticed the small piece of rawhide tied to the handle that tell’s everybody who the tool belongs to.
See, in the construction world, tools are easily misplaced and oftentimes they tend to grow legs and walk away. This is why a lot of people will write their name or initials on their tools with a marker or spray paint the tool or something like that. Since I had my own leather shop, I liked to tie a piece of rawhide to my tools.
So that was it! At that moment as I was climbing out of that window well I looked at Mike and said, “Rawhide!””
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