Why we built
TradeTrax
How three trade operators built the platform the industry never had.
Phoenix, Arizona · Scott Tonn, Toby Thomas & Mike Brewer
Sixteen Trucks: The Cost of Not Knowing
The founders of TradeTrax built some of the largest trade contracting businesses in Arizona: Austin Electric, Austin HVAC, Austin Concrete and Brewer Companies, who collectively touched over 10,000 homes a year. And every year, over $2 million in overhead went toward solving a problem that technology should have eliminated decades earlier: nobody knew whether a job site was actually ready.
That $2 million funded 16 to 17 people whose entire job was to drive to sites and find out. Each one ran about $130,000 fully-loaded — the driver, the truck, the gas, the cell phone, the laptop. And that was the floor, not the ceiling: it didn’t include the crew members in the area who’d swing by as part of their regular duties.
Not spending that money wasn’t really an option. Without site confirmation, the alternative was a dry run — crews dispatched to sites that weren’t ready, burning time and wages with nothing to show for it. When a dry run happens, the crews make less money. Nobody wins.
The choice was stark: absorb $2 million in annual overhead to ensure crews went to an always-ready site and stayed productive, or watch productivity collapse and lose the crews entirely. The founders kept spending the money. Because they couldn’t afford not to.
The Frog in the Pot
For fifty years, this was how residential construction operated. Schedules were a best guess. There was no reliable source of truth on job status. Trades absorbed enormous administrative overhead just to answer a basic question — is this site ready? — and built that cost into every bid they submitted to a homebuilder. Builders just paid it. Nobody had a better answer. And when jobs fell behind, the response was predictable: meetings, finger-pointing, and a slow excavation of what had gone wrong — one that rarely produced a clear answer and never prevented the same thing from happening the following week. Nobody questioned it, because nobody had ever known anything different.
It took selling their companies to force real accounting. As part of the due diligence process, Austin Electric, Austin HVAC, and Austin Concrete were scrutinized on every line item and squeezed on EBITDA. This also occurred when Brewer Companies soon thereafter sold to the same buyer as Austin Companies. That $2 million overhead was sitting right there on the books, demanding an explanation. COVID extended the due diligence period — and that extra time forced a question the founders had never fully confronted: was there anything they could simply buy to solve this?
There wasn’t. No product existed. That absence — not a market opportunity, not an investor pitch — is what created TradeTrax. “This needs to happen,” the founders recall. “We have to be able to communicate — builder to trade, trade to trade, in one place — to cut out the unnecessary physical checks on whether a site was ready.”
“Nobody came to us with a solution we could buy. There was no product on the shelf. So we were just like — this needs to happen.”
— Scott Tonn, Co-Founder
Twenty Bucks
The $2 million didn’t stay hidden in operations. It got built into every bid. Trades calculate overhead as a percentage of revenue, and every expense flows into that number, including the cost of those confirmation runs. When a trade submits a bid to a builder for a subdivision, that cost is baked into the per-unit price the builder sees.
For Austin Companies and Brewer Companies, the consequences were concrete. They would lose a $7,000-per-house subdivision contract to a competing trade whose bid came in just $20 lower per unit. Not because the competitor was more skilled. Not because they ran a better operation. But in a competitive bid, the builder takes the lowest number. Even a fraction of a percentage point in overhead — something entirely outside the quality of the work — was enough to lose it. “Why would I pay you $20 more? Joe down the street is just as good as you are.”
And Austin and Brewer Companies weren’t alone. With roughly 30 trades on a typical new home, each carrying the same overhead burden, that cost is embedded across every single build — absorbed by the builder, passed to the buyer. Invisible but real.
The math pointed in one direction: eliminate the overhead burden, lower the bid, protect the margin. Same profit, same quality, better shot at winning the work. That was the business case for TradeTrax before a single line of code was written.
“We would lose a $7,000-per-house contract over $20. And if you do the reverse math, you see what this was doing to trades.”
When the Crew Walks
The financial math was damaging enough. But the human cost ran deeper, and it traveled fast.
Like many markets, residential construction in Arizona runs on tight-knit crews. A family patriarch brings relatives; relatives bring their own crews. A group of twenty people might share meals, share rides, share apartments, attend the same church. That’s just how construction works. And when things go wrong on a job, word moves through those networks before the end of the day.
A skilled tradesperson working piece-rate expects to earn roughly $600 a day — about $3,000 a week. That’s what the job is worth when the site is ready and the work flows. But when a crew is dispatched to a site that isn’t ready, that $600 day becomes $180. Two days like that in a week and the math falls apart. Word gets around. A cousin’s crew across town doesn’t have those problems. So the worker leaves.
Replacing a skilled crew — if you can — means weeks of low productivity while new people are trained up. It means promising a builder 20 units a month and delivering 15. It means calling to explain the shortfall — or worse, saying nothing until the builder figures out the work was never done.
“The builder doesn’t know the work wasn’t done until the bill comes. Trades don’t bill until Friday. By then, three, four, five days are already gone. And the house sat empty.”
Mike Had a Word for It
The founding insight was simple enough to say in one breath: builder to trade, trade to trade — who’s next? A digital handoff. Real-time awareness of where a job stood, without anyone getting in a truck to find out.
Mike Brewer had a name for it already: Baton. As in passing the baton. The handoff. It captured exactly what was missing: a simple, reliable signal that one party had finished and the next could begin.
That concept became the genesis of TradeTrax. The original idea was simple: get builder and trade communicating in one place. It has since grown into something far larger — scheduling intelligence, performance data, automation, and analytics the industry had never had access to before. But the original idea, the thing that made it necessary, was still that simple handoff. Who’s next? And do they know the site is ready?
“The genesis was literally communication — builder to trade, in one place — so we could cut out the unnecessary physical checks on whether a job was ready.”
No Outside Money
When the founders decided to build TradeTrax, they funded it themselves — with money earned from decades of running the trade companies that showed them the problem firsthand. That decision was deliberate and personal, and the reasoning runs deeper than a preference for independence.
Giving back was part of it. The proceeds from decades of operating trades, from Austin Electric to Brewer Companies, went back into building something the industry needed and had never had. “We’re using the money we made because we love this industry — and we hate the waste of how things are currently done.”
Credibility was another part. TradeTrax is not a platform conceived by a private equity firm or a team of recent graduates experimenting with AI. It was built by people who started with boots in the dirt — who knew what a superintendent needs and understood what a crew’s day looks like when a site isn’t ready. That context isn’t incidental. It’s in the product.
And then there’s independence. The investors are the board. The board makes decisions together. There is no outside voice, no third party with competing priorities, no pressure to take the platform somewhere the founders didn’t choose. “We’re putting our money where our mouth is.”
Underneath all of it sits something harder to put into words. When a home is built badly — when it looks wrong, operates wrong, reflects poorly on everyone who touched it — the founders don’t want to be associated with that. They have kids who work in the trades. And those kids have friends who can’t afford houses. A home priced at $300,000 with unnecessary waste built into every trade’s overhead could be $285,000 without it. Maybe that $15,000 is what stands between a young couple and a home of their own. As the founders put it: “It’s in our blood.”
Zero Dead Days
The vision is clear.
Zero dead days on a job. Tasks that consume far more time than they should, finished faster — with multiple trades working the same day in sequences that have never been attempted before. Crews arriving with smarter intelligence, knowing exactly what they need, not taking contingency materials to the job just in case. That calculus changes when the data is right.
The result: a better home, built 50% faster than it does today. Better, smarter, safer, and higher quality. Not because the people doing the work changed, but because the information surrounding them finally got good enough to let them do it.
Getting there means aligning builder motivations, trade owner motivations, trade worker motivations, schedulers, superintendents, and managers — each with different reasons for caring about the same goal. The founders knew that going in. “This is hard to do.” But experience told them they were better positioned than anyone else to try. They had been large trades. They had touched thousands of homes. They understood the business from the inside.
“We made our money in the dirt, we’re putting it back into the industry that gave it to us — and we’re going to make TradeTrax the way homes get built.”
Meet the team behind TradeTrax
The founders, executives, and board members who built it.
