Skip to main content

About Us

CIMA General Contractors, Inc. is focused on commercial building construction in the restaurant, retail, and office sub-markets. CIMA was founded by Rick Nelson in 2010 after forming a successful engineering firm in 2005. Rick’s engineering firm, The Structural Alliance, continues to operate and works closely with CIMA. To achieve Rick’s vision for CIMA, he assembled a talented team with extensive construction-industry experience.

Client Advocacy

One thing our clients love about CIMA's staff is the ability to jump into a difficult situation, then offer constructive suggestions to reduce costs and maintain schedule. We aren't afraid to push our subcontractors or the designers to make changes to a project to resolve an issue more quickly or reduce costs. We often ask our subcontractors to do difficult things. Although they may not like it at the time, we maintain solid, ongoing subcontractor relationships because we value our subcontractor partners, pay promptly, and keep our promises.

Sticking to a Schedule

“Failure is not an option. We never miss a date!” Perhaps no contractor who has completed many projects can say that. At CIMA, we can say, “We have it in our blood to constantly push hard to meet our schedule and recover from delays”. Maintaining schedule and recovering from unavoidable delays is always one of our primary goals. By regularly completing work more quickly than other contractors, our bids include lower administrative costs and our clients begin generating revenue more quickly.

Back-office Organization

An element that sets CIMA apart from most smaller competitors and many larger competitors is our back-office management. We put a lot of effort into implementing processes to accurately account for cost. By requiring written contracts and change orders, we reduce the risk for disagreements because we avoid verbal agreements. We maintain solid record keeping so that we can keep our clients informed and avoid surprises. We even developed our own in-house project management and accounting software to improve our organization and efficiency. We regularly get feedback from our clients how impressed they are with our back-office management compared to other contractors with which they have worked.