From inside the trade, and tired of watching the wrong guys win.

My name is Jay Lapshov. I run growth, marketing, and operations for Silicon Valley Building Service and Repair, a San Jose remodeling company owned by David Mirassou: remodels, repairs, additions, the same high-ticket residential work Craftvane clients do. I'm not the owner and I don't hold a contractor license. My seat is pricing the jobs, running the marketing, and sitting across the table from homeowners deciding whether to trust a builder with six figures.

Here's the background behind that seat, so you can judge it for yourself:

• More than $2.6 million in ADU sales closed at Hauser Construction, an earlier role, carried from the first call to the signed contract.
• Before construction, I ran social media, paid ads, and photo and video production for 13 small businesses across the Bay Area.
• I've been building AI automation into marketing and estimating work since 2024: custom tooling, not prompts pasted into a chatbot.

And for years I watched a pattern that drove me crazy: the best builders I knew, guys with real craftsmanship and clean jobsites, were fighting for work while mediocre operators stayed booked solid. The difference was never the work. It was that the mediocre guys showed up when homeowners searched, and the good guys didn't.

I decided we weren't going to lose that way. I went deep on how contractors actually get found: local search, Google's map results, what makes a homeowner trust a website enough to call, why response speed decides who wins the lead, and, most recently, how AI assistants like ChatGPT decide which businesses to recommend.

Then I built the whole system for the company I work for: the site, the local search work, instant text-back on leads, and an automatic review engine. It worked. Within about two weeks of the site going live, a customer booked from organic search, and ChatGPT was recommending the company around the same time.

Craftvane exists because every good contractor deserves that machine, and almost nobody is building it for them. The agencies that serve contractors mostly don't understand the trade. They've never priced a change order or lost a bid by 3 percent. I've been in the room when it happened, and I still am, every week, at the company I work for.

You can check the sales and agency background yourself on LinkedIn.