Society has set the job standards so high that it potentially becomes a toxic environment for most employees. What’s worse is that people often treat trades, seasonal, and gig economy workers poorly when in fact, these people are working noble jobs that deserve the same level of respect. 

And as a values-driven entrepreneur, our guest Jessi Burg is always on the lookout for ways to spread her advocacy of teaching companies how to grow equitably and sustainably. She launched her business called Outgrow Your Garage with the sole purpose of helping business owners find the proper resources for them to utilize. In this episode, let’s take a glimpse and hear how this industry expert has been able to amplify her voice and use it to inspire many.
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Listen to the podcast here:

The Future of Blue-Collar Workforce: Filling in the Gap to Grow Trades and Service Businesses
Welcome to Actions-Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. One thing that often keeps a lot of people settling for less is perceptions and expectations. These could be expectations placed upon you based on your race, your gender, your family name, family history, or could be perceptions around certain specific pursuits, perceptions that will prevent you from pursuing what you really want to pursue. 

My guest today has some different ideas around some pursuits that have been placed at a lower level by some segments of society. What I'm talking about here is the traits, the people who do the home construction, the electricity, heating and air conditioning – a lot of things that require a lot of skill, a lot of knowledge, and are also very important to our lives. For some reason, we've placed them at a lower level. 

Jessi Burg is the founder of Outgrow Your Garage. Not only does she help these people form their own businesses but is an advocate for correcting these misperceptions.
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Jessi, welcome to the program.

 

Yeah. Thanks for having me.

 

All right, let's begin. Tell me a little bit about Outgrow Your Garage. You help people in the trades deal with the business side of their affairs essentially.

 

Yeah. There's a couple of things that are true about how trades businesses operate that are different from the way that a lot of other businesses operate. One is they are mobile, inherently mobile. You want your trades person to come to you and do a job onsite. Some of that actually is changing really interestingly, where you have construction that is now happening in factories, and then being carted to job sites. You still have to do that actual building onsite. Even if you have factory-produced walls, which are really interesting, you still have to install the HVAC. You still have to install the plumbing. You still have to install all of the different pieces of putting a house together. That has to happen onsite. 

 

Same thing with maintenance. You have these different maintenance pieces where the plumbing breaks in your house. You want somebody to come to your house to fix your plumbing. You do not want to watch a YouTube video on how to fix your own plumbing. Some people do, but most of us are like, "Please come fix the plumbing." You have this inherent mobility that's hard to plan on a business front. 

 

The other piece is that if you are, for example, a plumber, and you are a residential repair plumber, you're spending all of your time learning about updates to the plumbing field itself. You also need to know about every single plumbing system that has happened in your area for the last 100 or so years, whenever indoor plumbing became a thing in the place that you're living, and that timeframe varies. You don't have the time to learn about business in the same way, because your field changes all the time. There's new technology. There's new advancements in landscaping and construction right now. 

 

We're seeing this huge shift out of diesel-powered and gas-powered engines ...