Built by a contractor.

Why a twenty-year contractor is building the operational AI layer for service businesses.

I’m Peter Bigelow. For twenty years I ran a drywall and painting contracting business in Orange County. I built it from a one-man operation into a real company with crews, a fleet, and a steady book of work. I also watched it bleed margin every single week to problems no one talks about — missed calls, stalled estimates, dispatch chaos, customers who slipped away because nobody remembered to follow up.

The phones were never the real problem. The phones were the symptom of a business that couldn’t keep up with itself. I wore six hats badly — dispatcher, scheduler, sales rep, bookkeeper, foreman, owner. Every hat I dropped cost money. Some weeks the only reason we were profitable was because I’d taken on more work than any one person could manage and still answered the phone at 9 p.m. on a Sunday.

I built Oprantis because I needed it. Not as a phone-answering service — as the operational nervous system I wished I’d had during those twenty years. Aria taking the calls is the wedge. The real product is everything she helps you do once she’s inside your business: the dispatch she optimizes, the estimates she follows up, the patients she keeps from no-showing, the legal intakes she qualifies to full depth, the leaks she surfaces that you can’t see from inside the storm.

I’m not building this from a Silicon Valley conference room. I’m building it from the same Orange County zip code where I ran trucks. The first hundred customers will be contractors and clinics and law firms within driving distance. We’ll learn what’s broken in their businesses by being there when it breaks. Then we’ll build the next layer.

If you’ve ever lost a customer because nobody picked up — if you’ve ever sent a tech to the wrong job — if you’ve ever realized at 6 p.m. that you forgot to follow up on a $40,000 quote — you already know why I’m doing this. We start with the calls. We don’t stop there.