Growing success from strong foundations

CMP Pumping has come a long way since it was founded in 1999 by president and owner Doug Doggett. In the years since its inception, CMP Pumping has grown from serving only the Charlotte, North Carolina, area to having a fleet of concrete pumps across the Southeast U.S. Doggett also owns a successful stone slinger company, Stone Shooters of the Carolinas, founded in 2002.

The company’s roots actually go back beyond its founding date to Doug’s father, Bill Doggett, who established a successful concrete construction company in 1963. Bill started off in the industry by digging footings for foundations by hand. Doug still owns that company today, and together the three sister companies have become a huge success in the concrete industry across the Carolinas.

“I had the concrete construction business, and out of that was born Stone Shooters and CMP Pumping,” Doug says. “We’re a home-grown, local, privately held business.”

Concrete pumping is a major business in the booming construction industry. The company handles jobs ranging from residential slabs to skyscrapers in the fast-growing metropolises of the Southeast. CMP now has branches in Charlotte and Raleigh, North Carolina, and Columbia and Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, plus it is involved in special projects in Kentucky. The trucks will also travel to other states in the Southeast for projects.

Business is very strong, and the trucks are in constant demand, says Mark Gibbs, CMP’s dispatch manager and office manager.

“We have various size pumps, from a small pump that would be 20 meters, all the way up to the 63 meter, which is the largest pump available in the Carolinas,” Gibbs says. The majority of their concrete pumps are on Mack chassis. “Our fleet consists of over 50 pumps, and we have them mounted on both TerraPro^™and Granite^® chassis.

“Over the years, Mack has been the go-to chassis for the concrete pumping industry. It was always the right truck for us. Mack has done a great job making the chassis ride and perform like a smaller vehicle.”

Concrete pumping is a tough application for trucks, but the Mack chassis have shown they can take the stress. “We’ve got trucks in the fleet right now that we’ve had since the mid-2000s that are still operational,” Gibbs says. “But I’d say mostly from six to 10 years. If you have a good driver who takes care of the truck, the truck is going to last a lot longer. The pump probably wears out faster than the truck.”

Stone Shooters of the Carolinas relies on Mack^®TerraPro^™and Granite^® models to grow.

The application requires a stout chassis to provide a solid base for the pump’s boom, outriggers and the concrete pump itself. Mack’s MP engine powers the pump through a PTO. The truck must be on the job for long periods of time, with the engine running at load, and there is no place for downtime when a string of mixers is lined up to deliver concrete. This is where Mack proves its worth to demanding customers.

"Over the years, Mack has been the go-to chassis for the concrete pumping industry. It was always the right truck for us. Mack has done a great job making the chassis ride and perform like a smaller vehicle". Doug Doggett, CMP Pumping

The application requires a stout chassis to provide a solid base for the pump’s boom, outriggers and the concrete pump itself. Mack’s MP^® engine powers the pump through a PTO. The truck must be on the job for long periods of time, with the engine running at load, and there is no place for downtime when a string of mixers is lined up to deliver concrete. This is where Mack proves its worth to demanding customers.

Doug says they have been successful in part because of his companies’ relationships with suppliers, such as Mack Trucks and its dealers. “I always like to align myself with vendors that can support us,” says Doug, adding that this minimizes the complexity of maintaining the equipment in-house. Mack’s dealers are very responsive, he says. CMP works with its Charlotte-area dealer, McMahon Truck Centers, for service and parts. “McMahon in Charlotte has incredible service. Really from that point, it set our expectations.”

Mack Trucks also provides deep technical support to concrete customers through a dedicated concrete pump support group based in the Greensboro, North Carolina, Uptime Center.

“All that support behind the scenes is critical. That’s what I look at in the decision-making process,” Doug says.

Stone Shooters presents another aspect of the integrated business. While concrete pumps are mainly stationary while on a jobsite, the Stone Shooters trucks come to a site, quickly deliver their load and return to the quarry for more, making multiple trips per day.

“It’s an oversized dump truck with a conveyor belt in the bed,” says Zach Watts, Stone Shooters’ operations manager, about his Mack Granites. “We shoot rock, dirt, screenings—anything that’s not over 2-3 inches in size. We can haul 20 tons at a time and offload it in 10-20 minutes.”

The conveyor boom on the back of the truck can swing in a 240-degree arc and shoot materials as far as 70 feet through the air with precision. This makes the trucks very useful on tight jobsites that would otherwise require emptying a load of material with a skid steer loader over several trips, followed by laborers manually raking out the material. Time is money, after all, and with Stone Shooters, one operator can take the place of a small team.

“Places where it’s a little bit harder to get a piece of equipment into, it’s a lot easier for us just to pull up and shoot. Those are our bread-and-butter jobs,” Watts says.

Dependability is key for Watts. “We have very few problems with the trucks. When we do have issues, we use the Mack dealer in Rock Hill, South Carolina [a McMahon location]. They get them fixed pretty quick.”

One recent development that is a big plus for both companies the Mack m DRIVE^™ automated manual transmission.m DRIVE has demonstrated its robustness and reliability even for the demanding material placement applications of concrete pumping and stone shooting.

“We continue to look for opportunities to be at the forefront of technology,” Doug says.

Also, drivers like them. “The team likes these new automatic trucks,” Watts says. “It’s a lot easier to get them around these tight areas in Charlotte. Our trucks drive 40,000 to 50,000 miles a year, from the quarry to the jobsite multiple times a day. It’s a lot of starts and stops, and the m DRIVE is a benefit in traffic.”