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Comment by throwaway100773 | Hacker News Reader

The issue is that trades don’t scale like all of the things you mention. Even if you own a very successful plumbing company, your ability to scale is constrained by geography, labor costs and finding people you can trust to manage your company. Not to mention, there are market forces working against the plumber trying to scale, and the plumber’s ability to affect policy is proportional to the ability to scale.

Anecdotally, plumbers charge more per hour in some cases than many lawyers make. Their income, however, is limited by their ability to book many jobs and actually carry them out. The opportunity cost of one job is exactly another job. So comparing to other wage earners their income is high, but compared to a banker that can make several loans in the course of a day where the opportunity cost is only capital (which they have practically unlimited access to being that theyre a banker) changes the situation quite drastically.

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> The issue is that trades don’t scale like all of the things you mention.

The UK famously has a plumber worth $100 million - Charlie Mullins.

This is a great argument for starting a company in an industry where you are an expert, but this guy isn't doing house calls for hourly pay. He's taking a big cut of alllll the house calls.

According to wiki he is paying his plumbers more than I'd expect, which is cool.

>The company promotes itself as providing a high-quality service, employing "£80,000/year plumbers", charging £80–200/hour depending on time of day and service performed."

Someone said a plumbing business wouldn’t scale. He scaled a plumbing business. Obviously in scaling it, this multi-millionaire is not personally doing the plumbing anymore - you are right. I don’t see how that means he hasn’t scaled it though?

Exactly, none of the tech billionaires got where they are by coding or even designing software forever. I don't see a fundamental difference between that and managing a plumbing business.

The point I was trying to make was that the trades don’t scale like tech or banking do. It’s clear that this guy, who did manage to scale a trade, has a net worth of about 100mm after almost 40 years of scaling, whereas the most successful tech entrepreneurs have multiples of that in a quarter (or less) of a timeframe. This guy is an exception, but still sort of exemplifies what I’m trying to say. It’s worth noting that this guy may be the most successful plumber in the world (or at least on a short list of the most successful plumbers in the world). If we made a list of people in tech or finance, the people would be younger and richer by several orders of magnitude in some cases which is saying something when we’re talking about 100mm bucks.

My argument wasn’t that the trades don’t scale at all (this would be an asinine argument as I know contractors that do scale and this guy is clearly an exception to that argument), but rather that the trades don’t scale the same way tech or finance do.

Wow. I didn’t know that. Certainly an exception to my statement.

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