My Story
When I moved from hazardous materials contracting into environmental consulting in the early 2000s, I quickly ran into the same problem over and over again: handwritten Chain of Custody forms.
They were messy.
They slowed projects down.
They created errors and delays at the laboratory.
And they often made final reports harder for clients to understand.
Everyone accepted it as just part of the job. I didn’t.
In 2001 I decided to try something simple. I recreated the laboratory Chain of Custody form in Microsoft Excel so the information could be typed instead of handwritten.
It was not fancy, but it worked.
The forms became legible, consistent, and easier for laboratories to process. Errors dropped. Labs could enter data faster. Reports became cleaner and easier to produce.
That spreadsheet quietly followed me through every role I held in environmental consulting, including Project Manager, senior consultant, and eventually President of a consulting organization. Over time it became the operational backbone of my workflow and a small competitive advantage that I intentionally kept in-house.
Then smartphones arrived.
After decades in the environmental industry, one thing became impossible to ignore:
handwritten Chain of Custody forms were holding everyone back.
They caused delays.
They introduced errors.
They created confusion for both field teams and laboratories.
So I built a better way.
What started as a simple Excel tool evolved into a fully mobile solution designed to eliminate handwriting, streamline lab submissions, and give companies the flexibility to brand and customize their forms without friction.
Interactive COC is the result of years of real field work, lab experience, and constant refinement.
It’s built for the people doing the work — technicians in the field, analysts in the lab, and everyone in between.
If you’ve ever been slowed down by a messy COC, this platform is for you.
In 2010 I was sitting in a school parking lot waiting for my son’s basketball practice to begin when the idea finally clicked. If a phone could replace maps, cameras, notebooks, and GPS devices, why was the Chain of Custody process still stuck on clipboards?
That afternoon I began sketching out what a mobile-first workflow could look like. The goal was simple: a system a field technician could actually use in real time while standing at the job site. No pen. No scanning paperwork later. No retyping the same information again in the office.
What followed were years of development, false starts, wrong development teams, hard lessons, and persistence. The idea never went away because the problem never went away.
Eventually the vision became real.
Interactive COC is the result. It is a mobile platform designed to simplify laboratory submissions, improve documentation accuracy, and save time for both field teams and laboratories.
Every feature in the system exists because it solved a real problem I encountered in the field. Nothing was added simply to make the software look impressive.
After more than forty years working in environmental consulting and hazardous materials investigations, I have spent my career trying to simplify complex processes and make field work more efficient.
Interactive COC is the culmination of that effort.
If you have ever struggled with a messy Chain of Custody, duplicate data entry, or a laboratory calling days later with questions about handwriting, this is exactly who the system was built for.
And if you see ways it can be improved, I would genuinely like to hear them.
This is only the beginning.