Where Are All the Good Subcontractors?
Cheers to Dominick Armato—the contractor whose hardest project became the reason MySmartPlans exists.
After 45 years of running a respected union painting business, Dominick was persuaded by an out-of-town contractor to take over for a subcontractor that could not perform on the Whiteman Air Force Base housing project.
“We’ll make you whole. We’ll work with you. Just do this, and we’ll catch you up.”
Dominick knew his craft. We bonded the project with all our assets and trusted the wrong contractor.
Then the nightmare began: a deluge of emails, disconnected PDFs, demands without complete documentation, and promises that never became reality.
At the end of the project, we closed the doors on a 45-year-old business and spent $850,000 closing it responsibly.
The industry keeps asking: Where are all the good subcontractors?
Too many have been destroyed by greed, broken promises, missing information, and contract games. The greed of the industry forced that business to close. It did not end us.
Instead, we asked a bold question:
What if everyone could defend their contract?
With a $15,000 check, we launched MySmartPlans from a 700-square-foot garage. We built the environment we needed but did not have: one independent, organized, time-stamped project record where the facts are preserved and answers can be verified.
Today, MySmartPlans has prevented litigation, helped deliver a federal project with only one change order—and it was a deduct—and redefined what is possible when project data is complete, governed, and ready to answer.
What nearly destroyed us became the reason we built a better way for everyone else.
The industry can do better. We proved it.
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