I came here to say this. The newer generation are not craftsmen in the same ways as before. I'm a Software Engineer and it's the same mentality as somebody that is a Carpenter (my friend's dad is a carpenter that I have asked a lot of questions to).
The people that enjoy building and tinkering are more frequently doing this digitally. That is a big gap that isn't going to be filled as time goes on. "They don't make them like they used to" rings true.
I hired a carpenter a few years ago and we became friends / stay in touch. He had just started his own company in 2018 and the work he did for me he did with a “helper”. By 2020, he ran 5 crews and jumped in where needed to help keep deadlines and whatnot. In 2022, he said he hasn’t picked up a hammer in over a year other than training his crews of which he now has 12. All the growth has been entirely word of mouth, they all drive plain white construction vehicles without his company branding on them and he has never marketed his company at all.
What i mean is that construction as a whole is a completely overlooked market.
Working in that space since almost 5 years after product development in and for several industries for 20+ years.
It’s highly complex but the user group is an overlooked and diverse set of people that have to put up with less than crappy solutions for getting their jobs done - for the chaos that is construction.
So many opportunities and space for innovation that is not another food delivery service for meteopolitan areas but meaningful tools for people in dire need.
Latham identified industry inefficiencies, condemning existing industry practices as 'adversarial', 'ineffective', 'fragmented', 'incapable of delivering for its clients' and 'lacking respect for its employees'.
From 1994, almost two decades later and not much has changed.
Work is being done in this area, but it doesn't move as fast as people would think. Milwaukee is doing a lot of electric/battery tool development that replaces/enhances gas tools, and there are new construction methods that take time to be adopted.
Two off-hand that I can think of are "cast and move" bridges and hollowcore.
Construction moves very slowly because of the permitting process and the equipment investments. You also have to deal with the realities - if you build a standard house via the methods everyone around you uses, you'll have no problem finding people to perform maintenance on it. If you build it differently, people may not know how to deal with it, even if the method is technically better.
Many "US builders" are stealing techniques from Europe and vice versa.
I'm currently working in this space and agree - very underserved in a lot of different ways. Commercial is more served because more money is involved, residential is underserved because of a wide range of reasons, and its a pretty real and large problem that will get worse with time without some real movement.
There’s process and digital tools on the one end and on the other the ugly truth that almost everyone building spaces - be it commercial or residential - will be fed up with the low wages they get for the treciourous work they have to do in most cases since the number of people in “western countries” willing to work in construction is rapidly falling.
