You shouldn’t need a law degree to make a profit in a trade.

I’ve worn most of the hats this industry hands out. Marine Corps. High-end millwork. Electrical project manager running fast-paced, multi-scope work — thirty million dollars in contract value across my last six months, three screens of software, six jobs’ worth of responsibilities, and five days a week away from my family.

In the field, I heard it every day: the job’s losing money, the office blames the crew, the PM has no idea what’s happening out here. Then I became a PM and heard the other side: the field doesn’t care about the money — they just want the overtime.

Here’s what stuck with me: the complaints were the same. Two sides of the same wall, describing the same problem, blaming each other for it.

And both sides were wrong about each other. The field cares — every tradesman knows a company that keeps losing money stops making payroll. And the office isn’t the enemy — they’re buried, answering for numbers they can’t see behind. The truth is simpler than the fight: the field is the boots on the ground. They hear about delays before delays ever land on a desk. Nobody had given them a fast, honest way to get what they know into the hands of the people planning the work.

I said there was a better way to do it — out loud, probably too often. When that road ended, I went back to the field as a carpenter. And I heard the exact same frustrations I’d heard years before, word for word, from the other side of the wall.

That’s when the light came on.

I knew what had made me strong as a PM: planning, documentation, and listening to the field. So I built those into a tool a crew can run with zero experience. A foreman talks, types, or snaps a photo — seconds, between tasks — and Plinta compiles the daily log, the time submission, the report, the record. When a note touches something bigger — a delay, a design miss, a change in the work — it’s captured and time-stamped, standing there when the money conversation comes. And with our founding contractors, we’re building Plinta’s Contract AI to flag when a daily log touches a contract clause — so the risk gets handled before it gets expensive.

We named it Plinta, after the plinth — the block at the base of a column that carries everything above it. I spent years making them in the millwork shop. That’s what field data is: the base the whole job stands on.

One more thing. The company behind Plinta — Milestone Field Log LLC — carries my daughters’ initials. I started it after a career that kept me away from them five days a week. Every crew I’ve ever run, I treated like family. The subcontractors who build on Plinta are family too — because we’re after the same thing: a trade where doing the work right is enough to get paid right.