Bringing tech/AI to boring businesses
If you're someone considering starting a boring blue-collar AI-enabled business or offering services to them, read this.
Table of Contents
I see a lot of people talking about how it's better business with easier competition to go into things like construction and get an edge by being tech-forward.
I understand where that's coming from. I romanticize it sometimes too.
But I have a father and an uncle who have been in such blue-collar businesses for decades. They've collectively made and lost millions of dollars in this world. We're talking construction, concrete batch plants, transportation, scrapyards. I have had the "pleasure" of working around these businesses for my father for a short while.
Calling it the opposite of glamorous would be an understatement. It is just awful.
I will say things that might not be politically correct. The type of people you work with is entirely different from the type of people you encounter in tech. These people chain smoke, their default way of talking is yelling and they swear all the fucking time (the irony of me swearing right now). Their favorite pastime is drinking beer and watching some soccer or whatever. Objectively there's nothing wrong with that. I'm a live-and-let-live sort of guy. But do you think that you, a tech guy or gal, will find this sort of social circle and interactions fun? Do you think you'll even be able to manage these people?
That’s just the beginning though. People in these fields often have to wake up at 5 am. They often have to commute. They might have to commute to multiple places during the day depending on how many locations they work out of. They often work 12 hours a day.
And there's always something going on. There's always some metaphorical fire you as the owner operator have to put out. Some inspection has gone wrong. Some worker is not showing up, and you really needed them to show up today. Some client is being late on a payment.
It's not the polite, clean, sterile world that you know from software development, where you wake up at 9 AM, drink a coffee with your wife in your garden, then you go to your work-from-home office, turn on your computer, put in some lofi music, and spend a few hours working. Then you take lunch with your wife, then a bit more of the same work until you get to play with your kids because you are there, there's no commute. You're actually there as soon as you close for the day.
Another thing that most people don't understand is the economics of these businesses
They are not as sound as you think they would be. Construction, for example, has very very low profit margins. Concrete batch plants are an example where they have great profit margins when you have concrete to pour but in most temperate-climate countries you actually only really pour concrete half the year (winters are dead).
A lot of these blue-collar businesses are also capital expensive. The salaries might not be high vs a software developer but you have to buy all sorts of vehicles and machinery, which cost a lot!
This is absolutely not a business where you, Joe Shcmo from middle-of-nowhere, can just buy a laptop for $1,000, get an internet connection, learn a skill for free and then go make money. This is not a business where you can scale easily. You don't just put an ad on LinkedIn that you're hiring, go through 50 candidates, find one you like, buy a laptop, and then bada bing, bada boom.
You think you can sell to these people?
Try selling your new amazing offering to somebody that's been doing business with the same 10 people for the past 2 decades.
They don't care that you, with your edge, you can pass on some cost savings of 5% from a budget line item that’s less than 10% of their total costs because these decade old relationship are literally their friends now!
A form of selling too: try training the average worker in the construction industry who’s been working on Word & Excel from 2010 for now over a decade to adopt your new shiny software.
And these are just the problems I know of. Imagine all the unknown unknowns. This would be an entirely new domain to you or me. You don’t know anything about welding/concrete/semi-trucks/<insert thing>. And, trust me, you have to know. Because as the owner-operator of such a business YOU are responsible when absolutely anything breaks.
In Conclusion
I’m sure it can be done. I’m not saying it can’t. What I am saying is that you have to go into this with your eyes fully open. If you’re going in thinking “oh, I’m moving away from VC-backed tech world to blue-collar world cause the competition are dumb and it’ll be easy pickings.” you are in for a rude awakening. You may find you are not only unable but also unwilling to compete in the blue-collar world.
Another way of thinking about it is that, just like it took a very special type of person to be an indie hacker (you had to be good at design, coding, and marketing), it also takes a very special kind of person to do this (because you have to be good at the white-collar world and the blue-collar world at the same time).
If you are making an honest attempt right now at building an AI-enabled blue-collar business, I would love to meet you. I’d love to even interview you on my YouTube channel.
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