Alumni Excellence Awards: EnTERPreneur Award Winner Richard "Rick" Rudman '84

Rick Rudman bills himself “the Realtor’s general contractor.”

As president and CEO of Potomac, Md.-based Curbio, Rudman works with realtors and homeowners to make repairs and updates to homes before they go on the market. They’re improvements that can add tens of thousands of dollars to sales prices.

“And they sell faster,” says Rudman, who launched the company in 2017. “Especially today, the majority of buyers are looking for move-in ready properties. They don’t want a project. Maybe 40 years ago they were looking for that, but nowadays people want to move in and not spend their first year or two doing renovations.”

“Home improvement is not really a customer-friendly process, and it’s been done the same way for 50 years,” he adds. “Customers don’t really know what’s going on, or who’s showing up. It’s not transparent.”

Curbio created an app that allows customers to view regular updates on their project. In the multibillion-dollar home improvement industry, Rudman says, Curbio is the only tech-driven process for home improvement. Further, it streamlines services into one place.

“When you’re selling your home, you might have to do 20 things,” Rudman notes. “There’s really no general contractor that specializes in that many things.”

Curbio offers its services in 60 cities across the United States, using up to 1,000 subcontractors to complete jobs. The business often does bathroom and kitchen upgrades, as well as lay flooring, paint walls and the structure, and even replace light bulbs.

In 2022, Rudman was named an Entrepreneur of the Year 2022 Mid-Atlantic Award finalist, which honors entrepreneurs and leaders of high-growth companies “who think big to succeed.” He’s been a finalist three times.

He previously won the award outright as founder and CEO of Vocus, a public relations software company. Prior to that, Rudman was chairman, president and CEO of Tracx, a social media software company.

Rudman’s career aspirations were no sure thing after he graduated from high school. His parents expected him to enroll in college. “I wasn’t feeling it,” he says, “so I enlisted in the Air Force.”

A year into his tour, he decided he wanted to go to college after all. Rudman took night classes near his New Jersey base, and later extension courses in Germany that were offered by the University of Maryland Global Campus, finishing his undergraduate degree in accounting at UMD when he returned home. (Rudman also earned a diploma in electronics from the Community College of the Air Force.)

He figured accounting would lead to other professional opportunities.

“I was just always so fascinated with how businesses ran, how ideas became products and how different companies grew,” Rudman says. “I figured if I was going to do something business related, accounting would be a natural foundation where I’d get the nuts and bolts of business.”

His Curbio role hits close to home. Rudman says he hopes the business makes home buying and selling a less stressful experience for everyone involved.

“If we can get a home ready for market, so it looks good and it’s ready to have pictures taken, that’s our mission,” he says.

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