From Uniform to Utility Room

When I retired from the military after 22 years in the Air Force and the Army, I honestly thought I was leaving "mission failure" behind. Then I went back to something I'd done before, during, and after my time in uniform: working alongside tradespeople here in Oklahoma. And I started seeing a different kind of failure play out almost every day.

It wasn't bad workmanship. It wasn't lazy contractors. It was something way simpler: good plumbers and other trades were losing jobs they should have won, all because of a phone that rang at the wrong time.

The problem that followed me from job to job

Long before I founded RingBack Pro, I spent years in construction management and trades work around Oklahoma City. Even when my main job was military, I picked up part-time work in the trades to support my family and stay connected to the civilian side.

No matter where I went — whether it was a small plumbing shop in Yukon, a contractor doing work out near Lawton and Ft. Sill, or crews covering parts of Choctaw and Shawnee — the pattern was always the same: the phone would ring while we were under a house or on a ladder, nobody could safely stop what they were doing to answer it, and by the time they checked, the caller had already moved on.

These weren't cold leads from some national platform. They were real people in real trouble — flooded kitchens in Oklahoma City, busted lines in The Village, no-heat calls on a freezing morning in Guthrie. They'd found them because of our reputation or their own marketing funnels, and they were losing them to voicemail.

After seeing it enough times, it stopped being "just how it is" and started looking like a frustrating problem that needed to be solved.

Seeing it like a mission, not a product

One thing the military drills into you is that you don't just work around a critical problem — you fix it. You learn to break complex issues down, understand the constraints, and build a system that actually works in the real world.

When I looked at missed calls in the trades through that lens, it was obvious: the people best at the work are the least available to sit by a phone. A full-time receptionist with a fully loaded cost over $50k a year isn't realistic for a solo plumber or even a small shop with a few journeymen. Spouses doubling as 24/7 receptionists is a recipe for burnout, family and money stress. And customers in crisis do not wait around — they keep calling until someone answers.

In military terms, it's a bottleneck in the mission chain. Everything upstream is working — you've built trust, earned reviews, generated calls. Everything downstream is ready — you know how to do the work. The failure is happening in the few seconds between "phone rings" and "someone answers."

I realized this wasn't just an inconvenience. For independent trades in Oklahoma, it was a quiet crisis.

Waiting for the tools to catch up

The frustrating part was that for a long time, there wasn't a realistic fix. I could see the shape of the solution in my head: the phone had to get answered every time, even at night or on weekends. The caller needed to feel heard, not shoved to voicemail. The conversation needed to end with a confirmed time on the calendar. And the tradesperson needed to get the details without being yanked off every job.

But the technology just wasn't there yet in a way that was both good enough and affordable enough for a one- or two-person shop in Oklahoma.

Then, over the last year, something changed. The same kind of AI that used to be locked up in massive call centers became accessible, cheaper, and easier to use. Suddenly, it was possible to build a system that could answer the phone, talk to people naturally, and book jobs — even for a small shop in Yukon or El Reno.

That was the moment where "somebody should really do something about this" turned into "okay, I'm going to do something about this."

Why I built RingBack Pro

I didn't set out to build a startup that sounded impressive on LinkedIn. I set out to solve a very specific, very local problem: plumbers and other trades around Oklahoma City were losing work they had already earned because they physically couldn't answer the phone.

RingBack Pro is my attempt to fix that.

At its core, it's simple: when someone in the OKC area calls your business, they get a real conversation instead of voicemail. The system finds out what's wrong, checks when you're available, and books the job on your calendar. You get notified and keep working.

I think of it less as "some fancy new technology" and more as a new kind of tool in the tradesperson's toolbox. It doesn't replace your skills or your crew. It protects them. It makes sure the reputation you've spent years building doesn't get undercut by a missed call at the wrong moment.

Why this matters to me as a veteran

For a lot of veterans, the hardest part of leaving the military isn't missing the uniform or the base. It's missing the sense of mission — waking up every day knowing exactly what problem you're working to solve.

For me, that mission moved from the flightline and the ranges to the driveways and utility vans of Oklahoma's tradespeople. I saw good men and women — many of them veterans themselves — busting their tails, taking pride in their work, and still losing out because of a broken piece of the system they couldn't control.

I can't fix every challenge these small businesses face. But I can take one big, costly, stressful problem — missed calls — and make it a lot smaller.

If you're in the trades around OKC, this is for you

If you're running a plumbing or other trade business anywhere in the greater Oklahoma City area — Yukon, El Reno, Guthrie, Shawnee, Choctaw, Lawton near Ft. Sill, or even out toward Okemah — you've probably lived some version of this story. The constant ringing phone, the feeling of choosing between the customer in front of you and the one calling, the strain it puts on your family.

The short "Missed Call Crisis" clip above walks through exactly how big this problem really is and what a fix can look like. If it sounds uncomfortably familiar, I'd like to talk — not as a tech guy trying to push a product, but as a fellow Oklahoman and veteran who built something to help.