MY STORY
I started working when I was eight years old. Dairy farms with family and friends — hauling feed, mucking stalls, learning what it means to show up before the sun and not stop until the work is done. That was the foundation. By the time I was twelve, I already understood that real work doesn't care about your age.
At sixteen, I picked up landscaping. Did that for five years straight — mowing, hardscaping, planting, building retaining walls. Then I moved into construction. Roofing for a few years. Then remodeling — custom tile work, flooring, drywall, painting. If a house needed it, I could do it. During that same stretch I was also restoring semi trailers for a commercial boiler business. Seven years of that kind of work, bouncing between trades, learning every one of them from the inside out.
Then I went back to landscaping. I'm 43 now, still working at a landscaping company while I build this business on the side. Every system you see on this site was built in off-hours, weekends, and winters. That's the kind of commitment I bring to everything I do.
During those winters, I taught myself AI prompt engineering. Not coding. Not a CS degree. Not a bootcamp. I learned how to direct AI to build exactly what I needed — and I realized every trades business I'd ever worked for was running on spreadsheets, sticky notes, and "I'll remember that." I knew I could build something better, and now I had the tool to do it.
So I built 30+ production systems. Lead generation with AI-powered email enrichment. Automated marketing with drip campaigns. Trades dashboards for 22 different industries. A testing platform with production readiness scoring. A customer service bot with voice automation. A file processing engine that handles document management for every trade. All told, over 300,000 lines of production code across the entire ecosystem.
Now I'm building the business. Granite Models Automations isn't just a portfolio — it's an empire in progress. Lorie Prymas handles marketing, leads, and day-to-day operations. Elyssa Anderson runs creative direction and design. I build. Two Dell OptiPlex servers on fiber run everything. The goal is full business automation: SaaS subscriptions serving every trades company that needs this technology.
I'm serving the trades in a different way now. I spent my whole life in the trades. I know the work, I know the people, and I know what's missing. The software these businesses deserve has never existed — until now. That's what Granite Models Automations is. Built by a tradesman, for tradespeople.