Meet The CEO
I didn’t know it then, but the little girl bouncing through a hay field in an oversized go cart was already learning how she would spend the rest of her life winning races she wasn’t supposed to enter.
One of my earliest memories looks a lot like the photo above. It was a weekend in Liberty, Missouri on a backyard go cart track where boys and men came to race. Engines roared, fuel hung in the air, and the starter rope snapped like a chainsaw bringing each cart to life.
I was five years old.
The cart I drove was my brother’s number 15, and it was far too big for me. My legs were too short to reach both the brake and the gas at the same time. So I made a decision.
I used the gas.
When the tight S curve came up too fast, I couldn’t slow down, so I cut through the hay field beside the track and bounced my way back onto the pavement ahead of everyone else. Lap after lap, the same thing happened, and somehow I kept winning.
Where the Lesson Started
If you look closely at that photo, you’ll see a man sitting on a railroad tie with a Schlitz beer in his hand.
That’s my father.
I was his right hand girl. All weekend long I heard the same thing:
“Sis, get me a wrench.”
“Sis, hold the steering wheel.”
“Sis, grab that tool.”
My father wasn’t the kind of dad who gave hugs or long speeches about encouragement. Instead, he gave me something far more valuable.
He expected me to do the job.
No special treatment. No shortcuts. No excuses.
That little race track taught me something that still guides me today.
When the path in front of you doesn’t work, you find another way around it.
From a 700-Square-Foot Garage to an Industry-First Platform
I was a subcontractor’s wife. When a project should have made our family whole, it did not. Had the contract been honored, we would have finished the work and gone on. Instead, we shut down a 45-year subcontracting business.
I took $15,000, moved into a 700-square-foot garage, and built MySmartPlans—bootstrapped, without outside capital, and at lightning speed. We created the platform we wished had existed: an independent place where every owner, contractor, and trade partner can find the facts, defend the contract, and act from verified information.
MySmartPlans stops the change-order games, reduces costly litigation, and replaces hours of searching with decision-ready intelligence at the click of a button. Like Uber changed the taxi industry, we change who controls the route. No one participant should hold the gold medallion to the project’s information. With MySmartPlans, the project runs from a shared, compliance-ready record, and the owner retains the knowledge for the next 50 years.
We did not simply recover from what happened to us. We built the platform the entire industry should have had all along.
Start Your Engines
Along the way I’ve heard plenty from the sidelines—the names people call a woman who competes in spaces where she wasn’t expected, and the assumptions meant to slow her down.
But those voices misunderstand something about me. When I hear that noise, I don’t hear criticism. I hear one thing: Start your engines.
Because the moment someone doubts whether I belong in the race, I’m usually already halfway through the next turn. And when our clients cross the finish line successfully—with their projects completed and their people going home safely to their families—we’ll be right there with them, holding the checkered flag and ready with the green flag for the next race.