Almost every white-collar job now has a plausible story about being automated. The trades have a much shorter story, and Benjamin Behrooz of Branding Los Angeles tells it in one sentence.
AI Cannot Fix Your Roof
“we know blue collar work is gonna be the future. We know that AI can’t fix your roof, it can’t fix your door, the electrician can’t you can’t AI zap something for it to fix your electricity or your plumbing.”
— Benjamin Behrooz, Branding Los Angeles
Behrooz markets for home service companies, so this is a commercial observation rather than a philosophical one. His conclusion: “the future millionaires of this country are gonna be blue collar workers.”
Why Skilled Trades Are Getting More Valuable
Behrooz notes the flip side immediately — that everyone else has worked this out too, and “it’s a very inundated market.”
That is the honest picture for a homeowner. There are more contractors than ever competing for your attention, and the competition is largely happening in advertising rather than in craft. His advice to the companies themselves is telling: “Get creative. Do things that other people are not doing,” and “find avenues to where you can actually be personable” because “people are not picking up their phones anymore.”
In other words, the thing that is scarce is not marketing. It is somebody actually turning up.
What That Means For Hiring In Cookeville
Practitioner guidance. In a market with more advertising than capacity, the useful screening question is not how quickly someone answers a form — it is who does the work.
Ask whether the crew are employees or subcontractors, how long the lead carpenter has been with the company, and who will be on site on an average day. Ask to see work that is five years old rather than five weeks old. The advertising tells you about the marketing budget; the five-year-old work tells you about the craft.
The Craft Part Of A Remodel
In an older Cookeville house nothing is square, nothing is plumb, and no two door openings are the same. There is no template for scribing trim to a wall that has moved over eighty years, and no software that decides how much of the original to save.
That is the part of the job Behrooz is pointing at. It cannot be zapped, it cannot be outsourced, and it is the entire difference between a room that looks new and a room that looks like it was always there.
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