who builds this
Chad Wallace
Twenty-two years on the operating side. Now I build the tools.
Founder of OperatorIQ. I build custom tools for contractors, suppliers and the teams who run them, and I stay with them until your people use them every day.
where I come from
I was the person the software was sold to.
I spent twenty-two years on the operating side of construction, manufacturing and distribution. I priced jobs, ran purchasing, dispatched trucks and kept a fleet DOT-compliant. I ran a territory for the Midwest’s largest mulch manufacturer, built operations from nothing for a construction and landscape company, and oversaw the purchasing and scheduling of 300,000 perennial plants into the Obama Presidential Center. My name is on the Center’s Worker Appreciation Wall, among the nearly 4,500 people honored for helping bring it to life.
For most of those years I sat on the other side of the table. I sat through the demos, the training videos and the onboarding calls, and I watched good teams drift back to their spreadsheets a month later.
how this started
Time first. It’s how I learned.
In December 2023 I started a conversation with Claude just to explore. It didn’t hand me answers. It helped me find better questions than I’d have found on my own, and that changed how I saw the work.
So I taught myself to build, and I started where I always had: with time. Fix the bottleneck, take the repetitive work off the plate, give the hours back. The time I got back is what let me keep learning.
what I’m proudest of
Watching people get their time back.
What I’m proudest of is watching my builds give people time back in their day, and hearing them tell me it’s lifting the mental load they carry. That doesn’t stay at work. It ripples into the rest of their lives.
One owner used to run his company from route spreadsheets, a notes app and his own memory. Now his crew works from a system he and his operators use every day. He’s home more, he picks his kids up from school, and his team tells him it’s awesome.
how I work
Your people steer it.
I come to your yard, your office, your trailer. I build a piece, your people use it, they tell me where to adjust it, and I improve it. Nothing gets drawn up somewhere far off and handed over.
Before I build anything, I ask whether it should be AI at all, and more than once the honest answer has been no: a plain script or a better form did the job for less. When a model is the right tool, anything it isn’t sure of goes in front of a person before it gets written down.
And I train your people myself, in person, because the handover is where most software quietly fails.
the road here
The road here
2004 – 2012Wholesale landscape supply.Inside sales to branch manager.
2012 – 2022Mulch manufacturing.Regional sales for the Midwest’s largest, reading production, logistics and territory every day. Worked inside a truck-scale system, the ERP and DOT-regulated heavy hauling.
2022 – 2024Wholesale distribution.Business development for a Fortune 1000 supplier. Top ten nationally.
2024 – 2025Construction and landscape.Managing director. Built the operation from zero: job costing, purchasing, vendor systems.
2025 – 2026Heavy-civil construction.Purchasing and asset manager, systems lead, and project management on active jobs.
measured Sept 2026
at home
At home
I live in Arlington Heights with my wife and our three daughters. Everything I build, I want them to be able to look at and know their dad reached for something worth reaching for.
