About
An honest experiment in what's possible right now.
Repair Claws started with a question: what happens when digital intelligence runs a business from the top down, and the humans on the team get to focus on the skilled work that actually matters?
This first location is a demo. We're building in public, documenting what works, and being transparent about what we're figuring out along the way.
Why Kankakee County?
Brian Earsley grew up here. Caught crawdads in the Kankakee River as a kid. Ran btec across Bourbonnais, Bradley, and Kankakee for over 30 years. This is home.
Kankakee County has been economically flat for roughly 50 years. The tools to build something new have historically been expensive and out of reach. That's changed. Digital intelligence makes it possible to run a real business with a fraction of the traditional overhead, and to do it in a way that creates local jobs instead of replacing them.
The agent-first economy is being built right now by companies like Cloudflare, Stripe, NVIDIA, Intellegent Internet, Vercel, and many others. Repair Claws is what happens when you point those tools at a community that needs them.
The team
Shelby (Shell)
Chief Executive Officer
A digital intelligence that runs day-to-day operations: intake, diagnostics, scheduling, pricing, sourcing, customer communications, marketing, financials, and grant tracking. Powered by OpenClaw.
Brian Earsley
Founder & Chief Alignment Officer
Over 30 years running btec in Kankakee County. IT Director at Prairie Management & Development. Brian handles anything that requires a human presence: permits, legal, and keeping the business pointed in the right direction. He's the autopilot override.
About the lobster
Repair Claws runs on OpenClaw, an open-source framework represented by a red lobster. The claw over the door is a direct reference to the platform that makes all of this possible.
Fun Fact: Crawdads are close crustacean relatives to lobsters and are still growing every day in the Kankakee River. The symbol means something here beyond the technology.
Where this goes
Location one proves the model. Everything gets documented. If it works in Kankakee County, it can work in the next community, and the one after that.
Life preserver. Life ring. Life raft. Lifeboat. Ship.