OUR STORY

Throughout high school, I worked in the trades sporadically and then more regularly afterward, when I enrolled in community college night classes. By nineteen, I had become a competent carpenter and had solid experience setting tile.

With a mix of experience and blissful ignorance, I decided to start my own business. I put an ad in the PennySaver mailer and the largest county newspaper, and soon my phone was ringing off the hook.

My construction and remodeling business was born. It took a couple more years to get my contractor’s license, but I found myself in one of the best regions for custom construction: the greater Bay Area.

Putting one foot in front of the another, slowly I grew our company to become a prominent builder of large luxury estates in the region.

At twenty-two, I experienced my first major financial loss. I was hired by a larger builder to install interior trim for a project in Cupertino, CA. The scope expanded to include wall paneling, tiling a bathroom, and a large floor.

My final invoice for the additional work came to twelve thousand dollars, which was meant to be pure profit as I had already paid out-of-pocket for all the materials and extra labor.

That money would be enough to cover three months of living expenses at the time. Weeks passed, but the payment never arrived. When I finally reached out, the builder claimed that the extra work had never been formally agreed upon, and my contract was “paid in full.”

No matter how much I argued, I hit a brick wall. I even approached the homeowner, but they insisted I deal with the builder. Out of options, I placed a lien on the property and filed a small claims court.

A few weeks later, I received a letter from the homeowners' attorney demanding $2,500 to cover legal fees or signed proof of the agreement for the additional work.

I learned a harsh lesson: without a documented agreement, the work may as well have never happened. In my eagerness to keep the job moving, I hadn’t taken the time to draft a change order, and that oversight ended up costing me dearly.

I swore I'd never make that mistake again, but decades later, the change order process remains a struggle after nearly every build. We use the best software available, but some things always gets lost in translation, or the process is too cumbersome to complete in the moment.

One day, I was venting to a friend about the endless Change Order headaches, he laughed: 'Well, if all the big-time software solutions can't get you out of Excel and beyond sorting emails and texts, why don’t we just build the thing ourselves?' Getting stuff done is one thing I love more than anything. So that’s exactly what my co-founder Grant Jaffarian and I set out to do.