Millions of visitors are here for the World Cup, filming the $5 chickens and the gas stations. After 15 years around contractors, I think they're pointing the camera at the wrong thing.

A pool guy spent 17 seasons building someone else's business before finally deciding to build his own. His routes got cut. His income got cut. So he went out on his own. A few pool cleanings later, I built him a postcard-sending agent and a handful of other automations. The technology is interesting. His decision is the real story.

We used to compare Wordle scores.

Now we're comparing ZeroGPT scores.

A strange new hobby has emerged: running coworkers' emails, LinkedIn posts, and newsletters through AI detectors and pretending we're not all doing it.

What happens when AI adoption becomes a performance metric? Welcome to the Token Improvement Plan.

When Facebook laid off thousands of managers and doubled down on AI, most people read it as a tech story.

It isn't. It's an infrastructure story. And the businesses that stand to benefit most aren't in Silicon Valley. It’s the companies running plumbing trucks, fixing roofs and replacing furnaces.

Angie’s List built a marketplace around homeowner urgency. Martha Stewart’s new AI startup, Hint, is attempting to build something much more ambitious: an operating system for homeownership itself. One monetizes transactions. The other aims to compound trust before money moves. That distinction may quietly reshape the economics of home services over the next decade.

What if some of the most financially stable, recession-resistant careers in America are the ones nobody talks about at career day? A reflection on Snap-on route ownership, skilled trades, recurring-revenue businesses, and why my kids may understand something about success that many adults have forgotten.

In 2024, Salesforce deployed AI internally to handle customer support at scale. The result: 63% of support conversations resolved without a human ever getting involved. Millions of interactions, handled automatically. What they did with their support team after that is the part worth paying attention to. They did not let them go. They moved them — into customer success, onboarding, and retention roles. Work that actually requires a person. They called it redesign, reskill, redeploy, rebalance. Four words that should mean something to every home service operator in the country.

Most AI for home services is being sold by agency reps who've never dispatched a tech or read a job costing report. The pitch sounds good. The retainer doesn't. Here's what AI actually looks like when it's built for how a service business works—and what a 1% margin improvement is really worth.

Most contractors lose jobs not to better competitors but to whoever followed up one more time. The estimate you wrote off as dead last week probably was not. The homeowner got busy. The inbox got full. And the job went to whoever had the patience and the system to keep asking. Here is what that is costing you and how to stop it.

Indiana is winning the data center race. Google. Meta. Microsoft. Amazon. The investment is real and the momentum is genuine. But you cannot wire a data center without electricians. You cannot build the future without the workforce to construct it. And right now, that workforce is not ready. Here is what that means for Indiana, for contractors, and for the kid sitting in a high school classroom today who nobody is telling the truth to.

Filling out a Personal Financial Statement highlights a gap most business owners recognize immediately. The form asks for your lawyer, accountant, and tax advisor, but ignores the relationships that actually keep a trades business running. There is no line for the mechanic who keeps your trucks on the road, the supplier who comes through when it matters, or the people who make the work possible every day. In the trades, these are not secondary relationships. They are the foundation of the business.

Most contractors running review contests think they're building their reputation. Google's new policy says otherwise. If your follow-up process includes quotas, name-drop requests, or scripted language, your reviews may be getting filtered without you ever knowing it.

Pest control professionals are losing customers to ChatGPT, Home Depot, and a perception problem decades in the making. Here's how to close the respect gap, charge what you're worth, and market like the expert you already are.

Missing calls. Slow follow-up. More competition entering the trades. We went to Reddit to find out what contractors really think about AI, and what it means for running a tighter service business.

AI fluency isn't a credential for trades business owners. It's a multiplier, and the gap between owners who've built it into their operations and those who haven't is widening fast. Here's exactly where to start, and why your next hire might not be a person at all.

Everyone's talking about what diesel is doing to small contractors. Here's what to do about it: practical steps, real math, and AI systems built for trades businesses that can't afford to keep running the way they always have.

A satirical-but-serious checklist for AI agents tasked with hiring contractors on behalf of homeowners. Star ratings, it turns out, are the last place to look. Court records, review recency, licensing verification, and behavioral signals are where the truth actually lives.

The review system homeowners rely on to vet contractors is years out of date. Real-world signals, including legal activity, job completion, and recency don't factor in. This is what a trustworthy system would actually look like.

57% of contractors say their biggest lever for protecting profit in 2026 is timely, accurate billing. Not more leads. Not better pricing. Just getting paid correctly for work already done. Here's what that number actually tells us — and where AI automation fits in.