Developing innovative solutions to enable tradespeople to improve their efficiencies

Recent reports on the shortage of trade professionals on these shores is hardly surprising. The situation that we find ourselves now in with most hardware retailers citing the shortage as a key impediment to their business development, has been fermented by many years of poor government policy on construction apprenticeships coupled with an underwhelming promotion of the construction sector as an exciting career path.

While the shortage of trade professionals is not exclusive to Ireland, post Celtic tiger policies that urged partially educated apprentices to migrate only accentuated the problem and a failing construction sector hardly encouraged an influx of new apprentices or graduates. We are now dealing with the fallout of these times and decisions. However, perhaps more relevant is that the obvious growth in our population and prosperity in recent years has been allowed to significantly outpace efforts to build a skilled construction workforce that could even begin to match the resultant construction demands.

This is the real issue – it shouldn’t have happened this way. While the pandemic had a material impact on economic forecasts, it didn’t take a crystal ball to see that the construction sector was heating up. But with only a handful of apprenticeships enrolled in a four-year education cycle and no real push to add more, we are now suffering the consequences. We are however, as the man says, where we are.

As merchants who are now experiencing this shortage through your bottom line, the unfortunate truth is that there appears to be no silver bullet to address it directly. You cannot simply create or import the high numbers of skilled tradespeople needed. While government agencies are now proactively supporting construction companies, the current recruitment competition between European countries in this space is nothing short of fierce.

So, while it may be a bitter pill for many, this leaves builders merchants and hardware shops with few options to drive their business forward in the current environment. Competing on price, service and range are obvious go-to strategies, albeit not without significant cost or risk. A less considered strategy to consider may be to simply work better with what you already have – a customer base of active tradespeople with a finite output. If in doing so you can somehow help them increase this output, while retaining their loyal custom, then logically your sales will increase.

Internationally we are seeing retailers embrace a partnership approach to achieving these goals. In the US a high-profile partnership was forged between giants Walmart and Angi, www.angi.com, coming together to create a closed loop installation services marketplace for Walmart products that increased Walmart’s average order. This is powered by Angi’s technology and its vetted trade membership.

In the UK Selco provides an invoicing platform for its trade customers, helping them reduce their administration burden and free up their time to work on the tools. The above examples are just the beginning, but they show how forward thinking in retail can add value to an existing customer base while also adding to the bottom line.

At Onlinetradesmen, www.onlinetradesmen.ie, we call this partnership approach ‘Service Channel’ – helping retailers to leverage their base to add new revenue streams and expand existing ones. Since 2006 we have been developing innovative solutions to enable tradespeople to improve their efficiencies on a day-to-day basis, increasing their output and profitability. We are now working with international retailers to deliver ‘Service Channel’ to their businesses. We believe there is a strong opportunity for Irish merchants to do the same.

To date the Onlinetradesmen platform has processed in excess of 1.45M home improvement jobs across Ireland. While any economic slowdown may see the size of jobs reduce, we don’t see the volume or demand for qualified tradespeople diminishing within the RMI sector. Our market is both vibrant and well served, with many trade professionals choosing to work within the home improvement space over site work for the independence, rewards and work life balance that it provides.

I don’t have to tell you that targeting this fragmented cohort is difficult and expensive. International behemoths like Screwfix and Amazon with seemingly unlimited budgets, continue to grow market share with these customers. While their mission is certainly to continue this growth, their business models leave adequate opportunities for local, innovative competitors to thrive.

TED LAVERTY CEO, Onlinetradesmen.ie

Ted Laverty is the CEO of Onlinetradesmen.ie – Ireland’s leading and only standards-based home improvement services marketplace. Connecting homeowners to qualified trade professionals for over 130 job types, Onlinetradesmen also provides business support services to thousands of tradespeople across Ireland. Founded in 2006, Onlinetradesmen has processed over 1.45M home improvement jobs. Onlinetradesmen partners with retailers and membership bodies to enable them to deliver value add services to their customers.

This Business Support article featured in the January/February 2024 issue of The Hardware Journal.