As AI makes knowledge and answers cheaper, human judgment and discernment become more valuable. What that means for contractors, technicians, and the skilled trades.

I’d already decided I wasn’t stopping. Twenty minutes later, I’d made an 18-month commitment and asked the salesperson for his business card. After 15 years in marketing, it was a good reminder: we’ve gotten incredibly good at everything around the sale. I’m not sure we’ve gotten better at selling.

Roto-Rooter watched its Google Maps visibility fall from 72% to 24%, then spent millions buying leads it used to get for free. For independent contractors, there’s a lesson in that: organic visibility is worth protecting. Here’s how to make your Google Business Profile work harder before you have to pay for the click.

Roto-Rooter used to get most of its leads for free. Then its Google Maps visibility fell from 72% to 24%. Now it's paying roughly $94 per lead—and spending millions more to keep lead volume steady. Two years of earnings calls reveal what changed, and what independent contractors should learn from it.

A surprising LEGO internship reveals something much bigger happening across manufacturing. The best companies aren't waiting for graduates anymore—they're identifying and developing talent years earlier. Parents, educators, and employers who understand this shift will have a significant advantage.

Honey Homes vs. Angi isn't a rivalry — it's a preview of home services after search. Why context, not discovery, is becoming the moat.

Not a single contractor has ever pulled into a driveway and thought, "Man, if only I had some topographical drawing software." So why does so much B2B marketing sound like that's exactly what they're waiting for? A field guide to the twenty-year habit that's about to get worse thanks to AI — and the one rule every marketer used to know.

Everyone thinks the AI revolution belongs to software engineers. But Elon Musk's latest hiring announcement tells a different story. SpaceX isn't just looking for engineers—it's recruiting plumbers, electricians, and skilled tradespeople. The future of AI may depend less on who writes the code and more on who builds the world it runs on.

Concierge medicine is growing as physicians leave insurance-based practices. Here's why the shift says more about incentives, AI, and the future of trusted relationships than healthcare alone.

What happens when you plant pumpkins over a septic field? I have no idea, but I have a hypothesis. This fall, I'm running a very unscientific experiment to see if curiosity (and a little extra nitrogen) produces the best gourds in the neighborhood.

HubSpot built a marketing empire by mastering Google search. Then AI changed how people find answers. What happened next isn't just HubSpot's story: it's a preview of what's coming for every contractor who still thinks marketing is about getting found.

I wasn't expecting one of the best management lessons I'd read to come from Saturday Night Live. But Tina Fey's four rules of improv—agree, "yes, and," make statements, and embrace mistakes—turn out to be surprisingly relevant for anyone running a service business.

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.