The World Cup Visitors Are Missing America's Best Success Story
Have you seen the videos?
The World Cup is bringing millions of people to the United States, many for the first time, and judging by social media, they're all fascinated by the same handful of things: the $5 Costco rotisserie chicken, Buc-ee's, trucks the size of a studio apartment, and free refills. If I landed somewhere and found out I could buy a whole chicken for less than the cost of airport parking, I'd probably make a video too.
Every time one of those videos shows up in my feed, I find myself thinking the same thing: you're pointing the camera at the wrong thing.
The truck is interesting. The person getting out of it is more interesting because there's a decent chance they own the company whose name is painted on the side. Not just work there. Own it. And that's something a lot of Americans take for granted.
Over the years I've met HVAC owners who started with one truck and now employ dozens of people. Plumbers whose businesses support three generations of the same family. Electricians who still answer the phone themselves despite having twenty people on payroll. Landscapers who started with a pickup, a trailer, and a mower, and now run fleets across an entire city. None of them look particularly remarkable, and that's kind of the point. The wealth is hiding in a work truck and a pair of boots.
For all the attention America gets for Silicon Valley and Wall Street and billionaires, one of our most overlooked success stories is still sitting in ordinary neighborhoods — a surprising number of regular people who built extraordinary lives through skilled work. Not because they had the right degree, or knew the right people, or raised venture capital, but because they learned a skill, got really good at it, took a risk, and eventually put their name on the side of a truck.
There's something uniquely American about that. Not because other countries don't have tradespeople or entrepreneurs; they have plenty of both. But America is still one of the few places where a person can go from technician to owner with so little standing in the way. You can wake up one day, decide to go out on your own, and build a business one customer at a time, without asking anyone's permission.
That's rarer than it sounds, especially after we've spent twenty years telling young people that success only comes through a four-year degree and a desk job. The funny thing is that while we were all celebrating that one path, another one quietly kept turning out business owners: the HVAC owner sponsoring the Little League team, the roofer helping fund community events, the plumbing company employing ten families, the electrical contractor building careers for people who may never set foot on a college campus. These stories are everywhere. We just don't talk about them much.
And now Wall Street has noticed. Private equity firms have spent the last several years buying up HVAC, plumbing, and electrical companies at eye-popping valuations, and an industry once written off as sleepy and local is suddenly attracting serious money. Which should tell you something. The opportunity was always there — the rest of us were just looking somewhere else.
Look, I'm not here to romanticize the trades. The work is hard, the hours can be long, and running a business is stressful no matter what you do. But when I see World Cup visitors filming Buc-ee's and Costco chickens, I can't help thinking they're missing the most fascinating thing about America. It's not the gas station. It's not the chicken. It's not even the truck.
It's the person standing next to it, the one who learned a skill, built a business, employed their neighbors, and created a life most people never expected.
That's a uniquely American story. And in my opinion, it's a lot more interesting than a rotisserie chicken.