The contractor who learned to code his own back office
Trevor Maddux runs MotionOps, a software company in Sandy, Utah with a deeply unglamorous mission: make the plumber's Tuesday run smoother. The product is an all-in-one operating system for home and field service businesses - scheduling, CRM, proposals, invoicing, payment collection, digital agreements, time and expense tracking, payroll prep. The kind of work nobody writes a movie about, and the kind of work that decides whether a service company grows or quietly drowns in spreadsheets.
Most founders in this category studied the trades from a distance. Maddux lived inside them. For roughly two decades he built and scaled service companies - time at Vivint, at Castle Building and Development, and as a co-founder of Cransten Service All Stars, which grew into one of the largest handyman and remodeling outfits in the United States, operating across six states. He knows what a dispatch board looks like when it falls apart at 7am. That is the whole point.
Are you building this just for you, or is this a solution you could offer to everyone?
It started as a tool for his own crews
MotionOps was not born in a pitch deck. Maddux had been running a service company and, like every operator in the trades, was stitching together four or five separate apps to keep it alive. One for scheduling. One for invoicing. One for the CRM. One for paperwork. None of them talking to each other. So he started building something in-house - software for himself, to fix his own mess.
His longtime collaborator Nikola Cvetkovic, a tech entrepreneur who had spent over a decade building software and who had worked with Maddux for more than five years on custom tools for the service industry, asked the question that changes everything: was this just for Trevor, or could it be for everyone? That pivot - from internal hack to market product - is the founding moment. They co-founded MotionOps in 2021, with Cvetkovic leading the engineering side and a development team operating out of Serbia.
The split of labor is almost suspiciously clean. Maddux brings the operator's instinct for what service businesses actually need at 6am on a job site. Cvetkovic brings the code. Between them they cover the exact gap that has kept legacy field-service software feeling like it was designed by people who have never carried a ladder.
The problem, in one chart
How a typical service company runs its operations today vs. the MotionOps bet.
Hammer, then handyman empire, then codebase
- 2000s - 2010sTwo decades building service companies. Stints connected to Vivint and Castle Building and Development sharpen the operator's eye.
- 2016Co-founds Cransten Service All Stars. It grows into one of the largest handyman and remodeling companies in the country, across six states.
- 2021Co-founds MotionOps with Nikola Cvetkovic - the internal tool becomes a company.
- 2023Closes a $1.2M pre-seed round led by Alpine 100. An investor calls MotionOps the "prime contender" to disrupt the category leader.
- 2024Launches "Service Contractor All Star," a podcast for tradespeople, and appears on Silicon Slopes to talk about scaling the service industry.
We see MotionOps as the prime contender for disrupting the current industry leader.
A small round with a loud thesis
In August 2023, MotionOps secured $1.2 million in pre-seed funding led by Alpine 100, an early-stage firm founded by Scott Wyssling and David Card and based, fittingly, in Alpine, Utah. The bet was not subtle. Card predicted MotionOps would "emerge as the trusted software partner for all service related businesses" within five years.
The math behind that confidence is simple. Plumbers, electricians, HVAC techs, landscapers and remodelers are a massive, underserved market that mostly runs on duct-taped tooling. Whoever consolidates that stack into one platform that operators actually like has a very large prize. MotionOps' pitch leans hard on a single line that doubles as a worldview: crafted by professionals, for professionals.
Software, plus a microphone
MotionOps
The core product. One platform for scheduling, CRM, proposals, invoicing, payments, digital agreements, employee documents, skills tracking and payroll prep - built to retire the contractor's pile of disconnected apps.
Service Contractor All Star
A podcast Maddux launched for people who work in the trades, aiming to put genuinely useful business content in front of an audience that rarely gets it.
Silicon Slopes presence
An "Scaling the Service Industry" episode and reel place him squarely in Utah's startup community - operator, founder, and now a voice in the ecosystem.
The Cransten lineage
The handyman company he co-founded is both his proof of operating chops and a living reminder of the exact customer MotionOps is built to serve.
The credibility is in the calluses
Vertical software lives or dies on a single question: does the founder actually understand the work? It is easy to build a slick invoicing screen. It is hard to know that a landscaping crew needs a change-order request to take three taps, not nine, because the phone is being held with a muddy glove. Maddux's two decades in the field are not a charming biographical footnote. They are the moat.
There is something quietly subversive about the whole project. The trades are where a lot of the real economy actually happens, and they have been served last by the software industry's best minds. Maddux is pointing the talent at the people who fix the furnace. He started his podcast on the same theory - that the best business advice rarely reaches the job site, and somebody ought to carry it there.
He is not promising to reinvent the contractor. He is promising to get out of the contractor's way. In a market full of founders chasing the next shiny consumer app, betting your career on making a plumber's Tuesday smoother is its own kind of contrarian.