I wouldn't have been able to escape construction even if I tried. My father was a woodworker, making custom millwork for absurdly expensive homes in New York, Westchester, Greenwich, etc… At 8 years old all I knew about hedge fund managers is that they all wanted to show off their rift-sawn white oak kitchens. My mom ran the business, her office was full of binders overflowing with invoices. And instead of a basement, we had a 2500 ft² wood shop, where the hum of the compressor put me to sleep.

Every day, I saw how hard my parents worked to keep everything on track. In the car, there were calls with manufacturers, fights with architects, clients deciding mid-foundation-pour that, actually, they'd like to double the size of their addition — "Is it too late?" When a new project came in, my father would wake up at 5am and start drafting the shop drawings. He never learned AutoCAD so the drafting room was still full of Mylar and vellum.

The physical demands of blue-collar work are obvious to anyone who's witnessed it, but what often goes unnoticed is the crushing administrative burden that falls on these workers. An electrician friend I worked with accumulated over $25,000 in un-submitted invoices on my projects alone, not out of laziness, but because he was too busy actually doing his job to handle the paperwork. When it's 10 degrees Fahrenheit and you're troubleshooting a client's hot tub circuitry, the last thing on your mind is updating digital forms or maintaining detailed records. He's not unique in this experience - almost any contractor you talk to will have experienced something like this.

After I finished college, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I've always loved a million things, but I knew I wasn't going to be a professional dancer cum physicist cum architect. So I went back to work as a carpenter and renovator; the work I'd done as a teenager.

This was the first time I actually had responsibility, where I needed to keep track of a crew of guys, and where I had the technical skills to observe issues and raise changes. I was engaged in the constant decision-making that’s required on-site, the back and forth that needs to take place between clients, designers and subs. But we didn't have a good way to keep track of those decisions. Like many builders, we'd fall behind on change orders and then felt too uncomfortable to ask for an appropriate rate later on. I was okay at what I did, but I couldn’t understand why at the end of a hard day, I felt like I had to start at my second job: just writing down what I did in my first job! I was exhausted.

This all came to a head when I was rushing a handover on a project that just refused to go right — an old fridge had already exploded and flooded the first two floors with thousands of gallons of water. With just a couple weeks to go, after back-to-back all nighters, I went to attach a hole saw to my drill… “Did that just happen?” My palm was ripped open, and blood was dripping all over a freshly sanded floor. I was embarrassed, frustrated because I knew I’d be down and out for at least a couple days, and with everything that needed to be done, I couldn’t afford the delay. After my stitches and the adrenaline wore off, all I could think was, “What the F#@K am I doing with my life?”

Even in the best case, construction is tough, and there’s no reason we should be stuck with unnecessary busywork that just tires us out.

Don’t work tired, kids

When Yong Han and I first started discussing working together, we'd both landed on daily communication as the essential ingredient that needed to be improved in the industry. As the construction sector has been pushing toward professionalization, it often means adopting traditional white-collar tools — backend-heavy software and paperwork-intensive systems that nobody on-site has time for, and that fail to capture the fast-moving reality of construction work. Decisions are always made while standing in front of the actual problem, not while filling out forms at a desk later.

Our goal at OnSite is to harness these natural workflows. Instead of forcing construction professionals to translate their work into administrative tasks, we can capture the photos, conversations, and decisions that are already happening and manage the tedium on the backend. The goal isn't to add another layer of documentation, it's to make the documentation invisible, so builders can focus on what they do best: building.

I can’t say with confidence that with OnSite I’d have an unscarred hand, but I know I’d be less exhausted, make fewer mistakes, and feel more confident that my hard work would be appreciated. We all know that construction is demanding, but it doesn't have to come with a second job. 

In the next couple posts, I’ll be talking more about how OnSite came to be and the challenging lessons we’ve learned along the way, but if this piqued your interest, get in touch!