Listen Anywhere
There’s a stack of 60 resumes sitting on Charlie’s desk. Of those, 15 are hireable today. He doesn’t have the work to bring them on.
Meanwhile, every headline you read says there’s a labor shortage in construction. Hundreds of thousands of workers needed. The gap keeps widening.
Something doesn’t add up. And episode 66 of the Deconstruction Podcast gets into why, along with a more pressing question: if Johny and Charlie were starting iPLUMB from scratch in 2026, what would they actually do differently?
Run Lean From Day One
Johny’s first answer when asked what he’d prioritize: run lean.
It sounds obvious, but most contractors don’t do it. When work is coming in strong, there’s a tendency to staff up, add trucks, take on overhead. The business starts to reflect the good times instead of being built to survive the bad ones.
“If times are good and you’re running lean, you’re making a lot of money. When there’s a dip, the hit is very minimal.”
That’s the whole formula. The businesses that are getting hurt hardest right now aren’t necessarily the ones without work. A lot of them are businesses that scaled aggressively during the boom years and are now carrying weight they can’t support.
Lean isn’t the same as staying small. It means your expenses track your revenue, your team size reflects your committed workload, and you’re not one slow quarter away from decisions you don’t want to make.
Processes Before You Need Them
Both Johny and Charlie circled back to the same point: the businesses that get into trouble aren’t usually bad at the trade. They’re bad at the back office.
Scheduling, billing, following up on quotes, tracking job costs, managing a crew across multiple sites. None of that is taught on the job site. Guys who are great plumbers or electricians go out on their own and discover that half the job is now things they’ve never had to think about.
Charlie was direct about it. They created Jobtable for their own company, but even they had to force it on their team. People resist change. But once it’s running, the time savings are obvious. The problem is most contractors wait until they’re drowning before they put systems in place, and by then it’s hard to change how a team of 20 or 30 operates.
“Once you start hiring guys and everything’s moving, it’s very hard to stop that machine and transition to a more efficient way.”
The time to build the system is before you need it. When you bring on your first employee, having a clear process for scheduling, invoicing, and communication signals to that person that you’re running a real operation. It affects who stays.
Tools like Jobtable exist specifically to remove the barrier here. The setup is straightforward, and it handles job management, invoicing, and scheduling in one place without requiring a dedicated office manager to run it. 👉 Learn more at https://www.jobtable.com
The GC Relationship Is Still the Most Durable Asset in Construction
Charlie had one answer to why iPLUMB is booked two years out when other companies are laying off half their staff: they never stopped building relationships.
Not just clients. GC relationships. Fellow tradespeople. The network of people who know your work and will call you first when a project lands or pass your name to a contractor they just met.
He described talking to a GC recently who couldn’t figure out how they were still this busy. The answer wasn’t complicated. When things slow down, most contractors stop going out and meeting people because there’s nothing obvious to go out for. iPLUMB never stopped.
“When we’re very busy, we slam on the gas even harder.”
That’s the part that’s counterintuitive. You’d think a full schedule means you stop selling. But the companies that are consistently busy treat business development as a permanent function, not something you turn on when the pipeline dries up.
The practical version of this is simple. Drive around. Find GCs working in your market. Ask the HVAC guy on site who else he works with. Go to industry events. When you’re slow, there’s no reason you can’t knock on doors the way Johny’s real estate agent cousin does. He had a record Q1 in one of the worst markets of his career because he went back to door knocking and cold calls.
What’s Actually Happening With the Labor Shortage
The headline number: 350,000 new construction workers needed in the US in 2026, with that figure growing to 456,000 by 2027.
Johny’s take, plainly stated: “There’s definitely no labor shortage. At least not in our province.”
The issue isn’t a lack of workers. The issue is a lack of work. Construction starts are down year over year. High-rise projects, which used to employ hundreds of tradespeople per site across multiple trades, have been gutted. The residential market has cooled. Commercial is flat. The guys who were working those high-rise sites have to go somewhere.
What the labor shortage numbers capture is a mismatch between projected demand and available supply. The demand hasn’t materialized, so the shortage looks like a surplus. Companies aren’t hiring because there’s nothing to hire for.
Johny’s point about data is worth sitting with: nobody is talking to the people on the ground. Large companies get surveyed. Municipalities record permit applications. But the actual experience of the trade contractors running 5 to 50 person crews isn’t reflected in most of what gets reported.
If you’re reading labor shortage headlines and wondering why your guys aren’t getting called for interviews, this is why.
Spring Changes the Energy, But Not the Fundamentals
Charlie was clear that winter was brutal for their new construction projects, production slowed, costs went up, and the team took a beating. Spring helps. It lifts morale in ways that are hard to quantify but real, especially in a province where you go months without sunlight.
But nobody on this episode suggested that spring is going to reverse the underlying market conditions. Input prices are still elevated. Tariffs on steel, aluminum, and copper haven’t gone away. The clients who don’t have money in February don’t suddenly have it in April.
What spring does is open the window for the contractors who’ve been putting in the groundwork. If you’ve spent the winter building relationships, chasing bids, staying in front of GCs, you’re positioned to land work as projects start moving again. If you coasted through February and March assuming spring would bring the work to you, you’re going to be waiting.
“No one cares about you.”
Charlie’s billboard answer, delivered without hesitation.
He was serious. Not cynical, but serious. His framing: act as if no one is coming to help you. Your mom loves you. Your wife loves you. In business, you’re on your own. The second you start waiting for a hand up, you’ve already made a mistake.
It’s the same logic as everything else in this episode. The contractors who are busy right now didn’t wait for the market to come back. They treated slow periods as a reason to work harder on the things in their control: relationships, processes, efficiency, getting in front of clients.
The ones who are struggling are often the ones who assumed their reputation or their existing client base would carry them through. Maybe it would have in a different market. It’s not carrying many people through this one.
If you’re a contractor right now and you’re slow, the question isn’t whether you can find work. The question is how hard you’re willing to work to find it. Nobody is going to do that part for you.