Protecting businesses
one certification at a time

It started with a phone call that changed everything.

A small trucking company — 12 drivers, a family-run operation built over 20 years — had just been hit with a $16,000 FMCSA fine. One of their most reliable drivers had been on the road for three weeks with an expired CDL medical card. Nobody knew. The company tracked everything in a shared spreadsheet, and somewhere between a busy Monday and a missed email, the expiration slipped through the cracks.

The fine nearly broke them. They had to delay payroll. Two drivers almost quit. But it wasn’t even the money that hurt the most. It was the look on the owner’s face — a man who’d built his business from a single truck — when he said: “I thought I was on top of everything. I let my people down.”

That conversation kept me up at night. So I started talking to other business owners. What I heard broke my heart.

A construction foreman in Texas told me he kept OSHA certificates in a filing cabinet. When an inspector showed up unannounced, he spent 45 minutes frantically digging through folders while his crew stood idle. He couldn’t find two workers’ fall protection certs. The fine was $14,000. He said: “That money was supposed to be a new truck for the crew.”

A healthcare clinic manager in Ohio was juggling 30 nurses’ license renewals in an Excel file and email reminders she set on her personal phone. One nurse’s BLS certification lapsed for 11 days before anyone noticed. The clinic could have lost its accreditation. She told me: “I stay up at night worrying about what I might have missed.”

A restaurant owner in Florida had his food establishment shut down for 3 days because two employees’ food handler permits had expired. Three days of lost revenue. Loyal customers who saw the “closed” sign and never came back. He said: “I didn’t even know the permits had expired. Nobody told me.”

The story was always the same: good people, running honest businesses, doing their best — buried under a compliance system designed for Fortune 500 companies with entire legal departments. They were using spreadsheets, sticky notes, calendar reminders, and prayers. And it was costing them everything.

That’s when I decided to build CertTracker. Not another bloated enterprise platform with six-month onboarding and a sales team that won’t give you pricing. Something a 10-person team could set up in 15 minutes. Something that would simply watch the dates and tell you — 90 days out, 60 days out, 30 days out — so you never have to feel that pit in your stomach when the auditor walks through the door.

I built this for the trucking company owner who couldn’t make payroll after a fine. For the construction foreman who lost a truck’s worth of money to a filing cabinet. For the nurse manager who can’t sleep. For the restaurant owner who lost his regulars. For every small business owner who’s ever thought: “There has to be a better way.”

There is. And it’s called CertTracker.