A symbol that coordinates every note that follows it.
Built by owners who’ve run crews.
Alex spent a decade running crews in his family’s tree service business with his stepdad, Tim. He knows the early starts, the calls you miss from up a tree, and the paperwork that waits until Sunday night. Ruth is the office help he wished they’d had.
Alex Hines
CEO
15+ years founding, operating and scaling businesses, from main street to tech ventures. Built and sold an AI platform for evaluating acquisitions in 2025. Spent a decade running crews in his family’s tree service business.
James Sackey
COO
Ex-investment banker with $500M in deal experience, and a repeat founder who built and sold a sourcing platform after pursuing his own exhausting search. Owns a small business too, and knows what it takes to keep one running.
Nikhil Enmudi
CTO
Serial entrepreneur with 15+ years building complex engineering infrastructure, including 5 years architecting agentic systems at AWS, and previously built and sold a company with Alex. A small business owner himself, he’s lived the missed calls and late invoices Ruth now handles.
Why Ruth
We started with buyers. Then we listened to owners.
Clef started as a way to find a small business to buy. Along the way we spent a lot of time with owners who run crews, and they kept telling us the same thing.
The work isn’t the hard part. It’s everything around it: the call that comes in while you’re on a job, the quote nobody followed up, the materials nobody wrote down, the invoice that goes out late and gets paid later.
Software didn’t fix it, because the owner is on a roof, not at a desk. So we built Ruth, an office manager you text. She answers the phone, books the work, tracks every job, keeps the books, and chases what you’re owed. Think of her as the second brain behind the business.
Put Ruth to work this week.
Text her hello. She starts with your books, then takes on the phones and the jobs as she learns how you work.
