I got the offer.
I built this instead.

I run contracting companies. That's not a founder-story flourish — it's what I did this morning and what I'll be doing after you finish reading this.

Before that I worked inside a contracting organization through the stretch where it grew faster than anything I'd seen. I'm not going to tell you I built that — I didn't. What I got out of it was a front-row seat to what happens when recruiting, culture, incentives and systems all line up at the same moment, and how fast an organization moves when they do. I've been trying to reproduce that feeling ever since, and I've mostly failed at it.

Then I ran my own companies, and I found out what nobody tells you: the hard part isn't the work. We were good at the work. The hard part is that a contracting company generates administrative load faster than an owner can absorb it, and every unresolved thing routes back to your phone. I was the bottleneck and I called it being hands-on.

Some specifics, because vague founder stories are worthless. A top sales rep left to start his own company and took customers with him. I have had production managers bleed five hundred to a thousand dollars of excess material per job. I have said "I'll follow up next week" about an estimate more times than I can count and then not followed up. I bought five pieces of software I never fully implemented and kept paying for all five.

And the offers started coming.

They get more serious every year, and if you're reading this you've probably had one. What I noticed when I looked closely is that they weren't about my crews. Nobody was buying my craftsmanship. They were buying market share, and they were going to install their office on top of it.

So I went and read what these platforms actually do after they close. They keep the local name on the truck. They keep the local phone number. In most cases they keep the operator. What they change is the office — purchasing, payroll, data, recruiting, marketing, the phones. Thirty companies sharing one back office. That's the entire trick, and once you see it you can't unsee it.

Here's the part that made me build instead of sell. That shared office is worth six to ten turns of EBITDA. And the only way an independent contractor can buy it is to sell control of the company he built to get it. That's not a conspiracy — nobody's hiding it — but it is a market failure, and it's the reason people who never wanted to sell end up selling anyway.

So I built the office. Albert reads the whole operation every morning and tells me the three things that need me. Victor keeps production moving without waiting on my approval. Annie answers the phone at 8:40 on a Sunday, which is when the good jobs call.

Then I did the thing my accountant thought was stupid, which was decide the wrong move was keeping it to myself.

I'm not against private equity. Some of these operators are very good, plenty of owners who sold are happier than they've ever been, and a few of them are friends of mine. If you sold, I'm not talking about you.

What I'm against is narrower. Nobody should sell because they're exhausted and outgunned. Sell because you want to, at a number that reflects what you built, or don't sell at all and hand it to your kid. Either one is fine. Being forced into it by a back office you couldn't afford is not.

Build it. Own it. Become it. That's the whole thing.

— The founder
Contractor AI Office · Seattle, WA