On the crew
I started in solar at 20, running an install crew of two to five people at Trinity Solar: residential installs most weeks, plus commercial and ground-mount jobs that ran for months.
Racking, conduit runs, attics and crawl spaces, wire pulls, terminations, testing, commissioning and utility interconnection, with strict fall protection on every roof.
The plans were never right
Every job started by checking the design against the real house. It almost never matched, so I marked up the drawings and sent them back. By the time I moved into the design department, I’d been redesigning systems on site for three years.
In design I taught myself to code so I could automate the repetitive work. Those tools became the company standard. That led to CRM development in Salesforce, and then to being the company’s software engineer, where I hired and trained our first junior developer.
The license
The design software had to follow the electrical code, so I studied the NEC in depth. At some point I’d learned enough that getting licensed made sense. I passed all three parts of the exam and have held my NJ Electrical Contractor license (master electrician), #34EI01847900, since 2019. It’s active, and I serve as the qualifying licensee for an HVAC company.
Systems that make money
In 2019 I joined SolarReviews, a lead marketplace for solar and home services, as a senior backend engineer. I became its architect, led the US development team and an offshore team, and worked directly with the CEO, CTO and COO.
I designed the systems that priced leads and decided which contractors got them, the sales automation around them, and AI agents that talked to homeowners by text and phone. One AI voice system brought in about $100K a month from leads that had already been written off.
After 17 years in the industry, I started Jersey Keep to do that kind of work directly for local businesses.
How I work
- Trade-offs, not just answers.I’ll tell you what I’d pick, what it costs you, and what you give up.
- AI drafts. People own the commitments.I use AI heavily. I own the specs, the tests and anything that can’t be undone.
- Straight answers.If a setting in software you already pay for fixes it, I’ll say so.