I have spent twenty years watching people chase whatever the internet told them was the next gold rush. Right now everyone is pointing at AI, and almost nobody is pointing at the guy who can actually fix your water heater on a Sunday.
The thing AI still can’t touch
I recorded an episode of Unscripted SEO with Benjamin Behrooz, founder of the Branding Los Angeles agency network, and he said something that stuck with me long after we stopped recording. He had just come back from a trade show, full of energy about where the real money is going, and he put it bluntly.
“AI can’t fix your roof, it can’t fix your door — you can’t AI-zap something to fix your electricity or your plumbing. So we know the future millionaires of this country are gonna be blue-collar workers.”
— Benjamin Behrooz
He is right, and the math is not complicated. A chatbot can draft your itinerary, write your emails, and summarize a contract. It cannot crawl under a house, run a new circuit, or replace a section of decking before the rain comes back. The physical trades are the one category where the work has to be done by a person standing in your house, and that scarcity is about to get more valuable, not less.
Inundated markets reward the customer-first operator
Here is the catch Benjamin was honest about: blue-collar markets are crowded. Every roofer, plumber, and HVAC tech in your zip code is buying the same leads and running the same tired ads. Being a tradesperson is not the moat. Positioning is.
His advice on positioning is the part most contractors skip. They lead with what they bought instead of what the customer is losing sleep over.
“Go into the market on your customers’ terms. What are their pain points? What are they worried about? Just because you have AI services, they don’t give a damn — but they may want their calendar to work better.”
— Benjamin Behrooz
Swap “AI services” for “30 years of experience” or “licensed and insured” and the lesson holds. Nobody hires a roofer because the roofer is excited about roofing. They hire because there is a stain spreading across the ceiling and a baby’s room underneath it. The operators who win write their marketing about that ceiling, not about their truck.
This is the same gap I wrote about after a nonprofit consultant reframed marketing for me: most businesses describe themselves, when the customer only cares about themselves. Benjamin’s version is sharper because he ties it to a hot take that has teeth.
Build it for the customer, not your ego
When I asked him for the single biggest branding mistake he sees, he did not hesitate. “The biggest mistake? Creating it for yourself and not your customer.” If your service exists to flatter your own ambitions instead of solving a real problem, he says, you should just shut the business down now. Harsh, and correct.
The human layer is the product
This is not only a trades story. On Unscripted Small Business I talked with Cecily North of Traveling North Agency, who competes head-on with the most AI-disrupted thing imaginable: trip planning. Anyone can ask a chatbot to build a two-week Europe itinerary in nine seconds. So why pay a travel agent? Her answer reframes the whole question.
“Absolutely use AI, use ChatGPT to put the itinerary together, do your research. But when you’re actually going to book, book with a travel agent — because ChatGPT can’t help you if something goes wrong.”
— Cecily North
She lived that. A client’s VRBO in Scotland got sold out from under them mid-trip, and Cecily found them a new place to stay while they kept enjoying their vacation. No chatbot does that. The plan is a commodity; the human who fixes the plan when it breaks is the product. As she tells her clients, she is not an 800 number and she is not a bot.
That is the exact same value the blue-collar operator sells. The roofer is the person who shows up when the storm already won. The plumber is the human who answers at 9pm. AI raised the floor on planning and lowered the value of mere information, which means the premium has shifted to people who show up and take responsibility.
Treat it like a business, or it stays a hobby
The trap on both sides is the same. Plenty of skilled tradespeople and talented service providers stay broke because they treat a real business like a weekend gig. Cecily ran her agency for three years before the money showed up, and she is blunt about why.
“If you really want it to be successful, you need to treat it like a business. It took me three years to figure that out.” The revenue exploded the moment her mindset changed, not the moment her skill did. The skill was already there. The systems, the pricing, the refusal to give the work away to friends and family for free — that is what turned it into income.
This is the line I keep coming back to: you don’t have a business until you can leave it. A trade is a skill. A business is systems, visibility, and pricing wrapped around that skill. If everything stops when you put down the tools, you bought yourself a job, not a company.
Where I’d put my money
If I were starting over today, I would not try to out-prompt a billion-dollar model. I would learn a trade, then learn to market it like a customer-first business. The fundamentals I cover for local small businesses are the same ones a contractor needs: show up where customers already are, rank for the searches that signal real intent, and answer the phone like a human. The tooling I lean on at SEO Arcade exists to make that visibility cheaper to win.
I am watching this play out in my own backyard. The entrepreneurs I meet through the Digital Christian Collaborative here in Cookeville are not waiting for permission. They are building local, hands-on businesses in markets a chatbot can’t enter, and they are positioning around the customer instead of the trend.
The future millionaire is not the person with the best prompt. It is the person who can fix the thing that broke, market it on the customer’s terms, and treat the whole thing like the real business it is. AI can write about the roof all day. Somebody still has to climb up there.