On "The Trades Don’t Have a Price Problem. They Have a Buying Problem."

Lowest-bid procurement is a race to the bottom that kills the trades, but this framing gets it backward—contractors and GCs who keep chasing price aren't ignorant of the real cost, they're under margin pressure themselves and passing it down the chain. The honest take is that until homeowners, builders, and facility managers actually pay for quality and reliability instead of just shopping on spreadsheets, plumbers and HVAC shops stay squeezed. Shifting to lifetime-cost thinking sounds good in theory but requires the buyer to care more about uptime and longevity than the next line item, and that's a sales and education problem you can't solve by yourself. Start with your own work—document what you actually deliver in durability and reliability, and you might convince a few clients that cheap isn't a price point, it's a liability.