Seuren, who ran a contracting and house building company in Wellington, helped a builder mate on a bridge-building project where the client had been given quotes double what they were able to construct it for.
It seemed demand for simple, low-cost bridges was outstripping supply and when the recession stalled his regular workload, Seuren laid the groundwork for Bridge It.
Bridge It project manager Campbell Upperton says Seuren was an innovator by specialising in bridges and thinking bigger than the other one-man bands that were operating in the market at the time.
"Everyone was doing a bridge here, an underpass or a culvert and trying to do too much whereas we just thought 'nah, we'll just carry on with bridges'," says Upperton.
Farmers were the mainstay of the company in the early days.
Dairy farmers were coming under pressure from Fonterra to stop cows wading through rivers. Another factor was publicity over the legal battle fought by the Berrymans, a couple whose farm bridge collapsed 20 years ago, killing a beekeeper driving over it at the time, which resulted in more scrutiny of farm health and safety.
"Out of all the farmers I meet, I would say 95 per cent of them always mention that bridge," says Seuren.
Clear-span bridges 6m to 20m long, with no piers thrust into the riverbed, are the company's speciality. Not only does it mean very little disturbance to the river and its banks, the whole lot can be constructed with minimum disruption to the farmer.
It's also a lot cheaper to do it that way, says Seuren.
Upperton says Bridge It tries to build everything offsite in the workshop, prefabricating all the concrete and steel components before it arrives on site "as a bit of a jigsaw puzzle". Once the bridge has been snapped together, a crane comes the following day and lifts it into place.
The record to date has been two days for a 16m concrete bridge.
Construction can vary from steel framed, timber decked "CUTE" bridges designed to take a cow and a ute - hence the name - through to full concrete bridges that can take normal highway loading.
Design is done by Tauranga-based consulting engineers Tiaki Engineering, and Bridge It handles all aspects of the project, from consents through to traffic management.
The firm has used every kind of marketing to get business in the door, but the most effective has been about 500 signs nailed to farm fence rails around the country.
"For all the money we spend on the website and advertising, a lot of it just comes down to the signs that we put up," says operations manager Clark Mazey.
The firm is also getting noticed outside the farming sector, with consultants and engineers getting in touch to build bridges for everything from golf courses and subdivisions through to access bridges for forestry and mining clients.
"Where our bridges used to be all just farmers, we've now developed quite a broad range of clients and we're probably looking at almost over 50 per cent coming from that corporate market," says Seuren.
A just-opened pedestrian bridge at McLaren Falls in the Kaimai Ranges, near Tauranga, has been a standout project for the team. Project manager Upperton says while every job has its quirks, hanging 40 tonnes of concrete panels off a couple of suspension towers in the middle of nowhere was challenging.
"That bridge went in in three days," he says.
"That was the only window we had in terms of public road closures and it went off well."
The team also recently won the 2014 Hirepool Construction Excellence Award for projects under $500,000, for its longest clear-span bridge, a 34m steel and concrete bridge to take stock across the Motu River on a remote Gisborne farm.
Seuren says the publicity from these high profile projects, plus the young, innovative thinking provided by Upperton and Mazey, who came on board nine months ago, has seen business skyrocket.
Creating consistent workflow had always been an issue, particularly over the quieter winter months. However the company now has 12 fulltime employees and a forward workload of 20 bridges in the diary.
Having built just one bridge in its first year of operation six years ago, Bridge It now completes 50 bridges a year, as far afield as the Pacific Islands.
Seuren, who originally moved to Katikati to semi-retire, says the sky's the limit for Bridge It's growth.
