Welcome to Advancing the Trades: Why This Site Exists and Where We're Headed

Every business I have ever walked into, whether it was mine or someone else's, was carrying something. A brick nobody talked about. A mistake filed away instead of fixed. A lesson paid for twice because nobody stopped to write it down the first time.

That is where Advancing the Trades starts.

I did not learn business in a classroom. I learned it standing on a scrap header piece because I was too short to reach the pipe threader, running punch lists out of my dad's plumbing truck before I was old enough to drive one. I learned it on the North Slope of Alaska, where every procedure mattered because nothing forgave a shortcut. I learned it building a plumbing and HVAC company in Sacramento with my wife Angie, winning Best of the Best nine years running, and then learning it all over again when my own heart forced me to sell the business I built. Most recently, I spent years inside ServiceTitan working directly with contractors across the country, watching the same problems show up in shop after shop. Different trucks. Different logos. Same brick.

Advancing the Trades exists to help contractors put that brick down, and to help the next generation see the trades for what they actually are: a high tech, high skill, high opportunity path that never runs out of demand.

Why now

The trades are short on people at the exact moment they need more of them. Industry research points to roughly 2.1 million unfilled skilled trades jobs by 2030, with about 600,000 trade jobs posted every year against only around 150,000 new apprentices entering the field. (Sources: JLL Skilled Trades Research, 2026; Associated Builders and Contractors, 2026 Workforce Survey.)

That gap will not close with better job postings. It closes when contractors run stronger businesses, when the next generation actually sees what a career in the trades looks like, and when the people already in the industry have somewhere to point to for both.

What this site is built on

Advancing the Trades stands on four pillars, and everything we publish here will fall under one of them.

• Mentorship. Paid, direct guidance for contractors who are ready to move from grit to a real operating system. Speaking engagements and workshops, including sessions like Build Your First P.O.G., live under this pillar too.

• Technology. Making sense of ServiceTitan, AI, and the tools reshaping how trade businesses run.

• Youth Advocacy. Apprenticeship pathways and school partnerships that show the next generation the trades are a position of strength, not a fallback plan. This is also where the Advancing Academy will eventually live, currently in development.

• Industry Voice. The Live Cast, conversations with trades experts and leaders, this blog, and the book.

The book

Failing to Fail: The Forensic Pursuit of Business Mastery is coming this fall. It walks through the BUILD Protocol, the five step system I use to turn a setback into something usable: Rewire, Extract, Validate, Encode, Execute. The short version is this. Every business owner is carrying a backpack full of unprocessed failures. Bricks were never meant to be carried forever. They were meant to be built with.

What you will find on this blog

This is where the real work gets documented. Lessons from the field. Breakdowns of the BUILD Protocol in action. Straight talk about the skilled trades shortage and what contractors and industry partners can actually do about it. Recaps and takeaways from the Live Cast once it launches. No fluff, no fake case studies, no advice I have not tested myself.

If you run a trade business, mentor one, or care about where the next generation of tradespeople is going to come from, you are exactly who this is for.

The site launches this September. The book follows this fall. The blog starts now.

Every experience builds something. Make sure it's a system.

TimmyBoy Founder, Advancing the Trades | Author, Failing to Fail