Built by an electrician who got tired of missing his own calls.

Here's the math nobody tells you when you start your own shop: when you're the technician, the dispatcher, the sales guy, and the bookkeeper, something breaks. For me, it was the phone — but really, it was bigger than that.

What if I could focus on the work in front of me without the constant interruption? What if every new customer's first impression was a home run, every time? What if I had a life again — time to think, time to actually be present with my family?

Those were the questions I started asking myself. Because at some point you realize: it's not the wiring or the panels or the service calls that are wearing you out. It's the running, the estimating, the answering, the chasing — all the stuff between the work that has nothing to do with the work.

I love what I do. I just kept getting pulled off it. Family vacation memories — pulled away by the phone. In the middle of a layout, completely focused, my guys waiting on a call from me — phone rings, and I walk away. Because what if it’s a new customer? I come back ten minutes later flustered, half out of touch with what I was doing, dragging bad juju into the client relationship and wasting time on top of it. The phone alone was enough to make me insane.

And here’s the worst part — half the time it wasn’t even a real lead. It was a contractor pulling me one way, a customer pulling me another, somebody confirming an appointment I already had on the calendar. The actual new customer? Often they were the one I missed.

I tried answering services. Too generic, no idea what an "arc fault" was, kept booking jobs I couldn't do. I tried just letting it go to voicemail. The numbers said it all — I'd call back two hours later and the customer had already booked someone else. I tried hiring a part-time admin. Couldn't justify the cost when work was slow, couldn't keep her busy when work was steady.

The real problem wasn't any of those things specifically. The real problem was that nothing on the market was built for how a one-truck contractor actually works. Everything was either too generic (call centers) or too expensive (full-time staff) or too clunky (most software).

So I started building what I wished existed. An AI that picks up every call in my voice, knows what an arc fault is, knows the difference between a service call and a panel upgrade, takes the job details, texts me a clean summary, and lets me decide who to call back first. No call centers. No salaried admin. No voicemails losing money.

That's Codex Relay. I'm the first customer. You're the second.