Bonnie Rimel formed her company Bonn-J in 1987, in what she now calls “the dark ages of women in construction.”
It’s not that she needed the challenge at the time. Bonnie already had a career that kept her plenty busy, managing 85 W.E. Walker stores, which she describes as “mini Walmarts.”
But she heard about MSE walls – mechanically stabilized earth retaining walls -- and that they were newly approved by the Florida Department of Transportation. “It was a great opportunity,” she says. “No one else was doing it. I wanted to be the MSE wall builder of Florida.”
The good news was that Bonn-J quickly got a job. The bad news was due to unforeseen difficulties it didn’t start for three years.
In the meantime, she did anything she could to make the business viable. “I was fortunate to find a crane operator and find some miscellaneous concrete work,” Bonnie says. “We did fence, rebar, really anything we could do.”
While waiting for that first job to materialize, Bonnie was able to showcase MSE walls on another highway project. “Nobody knew anything about the system,” she says, “but they saw I knew what I was doing. I gained two other contracts just from that one job. They were my salvation.”
In 2009, when she got what she calls her “ultimate job,” a $40 million contract on I-595 in Fort Lauderdale, Bonnie decided to brand the equipment on that job with a unique color: pink. It was also in honor of a friend with breast cancer.
