The Future of Blue-Collar Workforce: Filling in the Gap to Grow Trades and Service Businesses with Jessi Burg

Society has set the job standards so high that it potentially becomes a toxic environment for most employees. What’s worse is that people often treat trades, seasonal, and gig economy workers poorly when in fact, these people are working noble jobs that deserve the same level of respect. And as a values-driven entrepreneur, our guest Jessi Burg is always on the lookout for ways to spread her advocacy of teaching companies how to grow equitably and sustainably. She launched her business called Outgrow Your Garage with the sole purpose of helping business owners find the proper resources for them to utilize. In this episode, let’s take a glimpse and hear how this industry expert has been able to amplify her voice and use it to inspire many. --- Listen to the podcast here: The Future of Blue-Collar Workforce: Filling in the Gap to Grow Trades and Service Businesses Welcome to Actions-Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. One thing that often keeps a lot of people settling for less is perceptions and expectations. These could be expectations placed upon you based on your race, your gender, your family name, family history, or could be perceptions around certain specific pursuits, perceptions that will prevent you from pursuing what you really want to pursue. My guest today has some different ideas around some pursuits that have been placed at a lower level by some segments of society. What I'm talking about here is the traits, the people who do the home construction, the electricity, heating and air conditioning – a lot of things that require a lot of skill, a lot of knowledge, and are also very important to our lives. For some reason, we've placed them at a lower level. Jessi Burg is the founder of Outgrow Your Garage. Not only does she help these people form their own businesses but is an advocate for correcting these misperceptions. --- Jessi, welcome to the program. Yeah. Thanks for having me. All right, let's begin. Tell me a little bit about Outgrow Your Garage. You help people in the trades deal with the business side of their affairs essentially. Yeah. There's a couple of things that are true about how trades businesses operate that are different from the way that a lot of other businesses operate. One is they are mobile, inherently mobile. You want your trades person to come to you and do a job onsite. Some of that actually is changing really interestingly, where you have construction that is now happening in factories, and then being carted to job sites. You still have to do that actual building onsite. Even if you have factory-produced walls, which are really interesting, you still have to install the HVAC. You still have to install the plumbing. You still have to install all of the different pieces of putting a house together. That has to happen onsite. Same thing with maintenance. You have these different maintenance pieces where the plumbing breaks in your house. You want somebody to come to your house to fix your plumbing. You do not want to watch a YouTube video on how to fix your own plumbing. Some people do, but most of us are like, "Please come fix the plumbing." You have this inherent mobility that's hard to plan on a business front. The other piece is that if you are, for example, a plumber, and you are a residential repair plumber, you're spending all of your time learning about updates to the plumbing field itself. You also need to know about every single plumbing system that has happened in your area for the last 100 or so years, whenever indoor plumbing became a thing in the place that you're living, and that timeframe varies. You don't have the time to learn about business in the same way, because your field changes all the time. There's new technology. There's new advancements in landscaping and construction right now. We're seeing this huge shift out of diesel-powered and gas-powered engines into electric. Suddenly, you have to rethink, as a company, the entire way that your business is operating, the tools of your trade that you've been using for the last 50 years. It doesn't leave you a lot of brainpower left to learn about how business works. Outgrow Your Garage really fills in that gap of – here is how basic business concepts work. Here is how to find somebody who can help you apply that to your business. It's presented in a way that works for people who are moving all the time. We do online courses. They're downloadable to your phone. You can watch the videos in 10 minutes or less. You do an activity. It applies directly to your business that day. You also are able to then have a list of "here are further resources". On our hiring course right now that is out, we talked about how to write a job description, and how to start an employee handbook, and how to figure out the difference between a W2 and a 1099 employee. You also get this list of people at the end who can help you with any legal requirements in your state. You get a link to the SBA to be able to say, "Here is some free consulting that will help you figure out what your business specifically needs to be able to legally hire in your state. Here's how to talk to an insurance broker to figure out if you need worker’s comp and unemployment insurance", all these different pieces We're filling in that gap and making it approachable in a way that works for these businesses that don't fit neatly into your standard business models. Now, when people pursue the trades, what percentage of them are starting their own business? What's the lay of the land? Are there a lot of companies they end up working for, or most of them end up being independent and starting their own thing? That's a really interesting question. One of the other things that's true about trades is you can start a trades business without any capital.Share on X No one really knows how many of these businesses are out there, because we all know somebody who runs a handy person business on the side. "Oh, they fix cars on the side." Those are all businesses, but they might not be registered legally. The other thing that's true about trades businesses is so many of them are side hustles to start with, and then they might turn into real businesses. Yeah, their main hustle. They're what they primarily do. Not real businesses but more full-time businesses. It really depends on how you count it. There's not a good way to know exactly how many. What we do know is that of all the people in trades, the vast majority will work for some of your larger companies. One of the things that I find really entertaining about the trades as a whole is it contains a lot of the largest companies you've never heard of. My background is in landscaping. BrightView is one of the largest landscaping companies in the country. It services most of the western United States, and most of the western United States has never heard of BrightView even though they probably do the mowing for every single corporate campus that you've seen in town. A lot of people will work for those styles of companies, because they have apprenticeship programs. They have training programs. They'll do that. What happens is, as people shift, they tend to break out into smaller companies. What is the advantage for, say, someone in landscaping to work for a company versus try to strike out on their own? Is there a certain point where you outgrow it and you have more earning potential by starting your own business? You will always have more earning potential starting your own business, particularly in what is colloquially known as the unskilled trades, which is a term I hate. There is no such thing as unskilled labor.Share on X Landscaping is a great example. House cleaning is another great example of this. There is this idea that, "Oh, I can do that myself. I can pull my own weeds. I can mow my own lawn. I can clean my own bathroom." Sure, we all can, but that doesn't mean you want to, and not everybody can. Some landscaping involves shoveling several tons of rock at a time. Not everybody can shovel several tons of rocks at a time. We have this idea of that. In that style of business, there's always more money to be made if you own your own company. You get to then set your own rates, and you get to keep a larger percentage of those dollars. The other thing that's true is, in some of the trades you operated -- and this really cutthroat level -- a good example of that is apartment cleanouts. If you operate a company that goes in and does commercial cleaning for apartment buildings, that's a very, very cutthroat industry. Generally, people who own apartments are going to take the lowest bid on that. Your margins are already so small, which necessarily depresses the wages of anybody working for those companies. Owning the company is really the only way to make a viable income for most people. That being said, a lot of people don't want to do it. It's a lot of work. There is an advantage to being an employee where you get the stability of a paycheck. You get to show up to work at the end of the day. You go home at the end of the day. You get to put it down. You don't have to spend all day at a computer. Nobody goes into trades, because they want to answer emails at the end of their workday. There's advantages and disadvantages to both sides. In that sense, it's like starting any other business, either you want to be your own boss or you don't. Both options are fine. It's just about what works for you. It reminds me of something that I often talk about when people are trying to figure out their paths and figure out their business of just the idea of lifestyle versus scale. When I think of people who are doing their side hustle that they're trying to turn to their main hustle,...