Mischa Fisher - Angi’s Skilled Trades in America report - PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION

Editor's note: The following is the transcript of an live interview with Mischa Fisher of Angi. You can read the interview below or listen to the podcast. 

Megan Ellsworth:
Welcome to Roofing Road Trips with Heidi. Explore the roofing industry through the eyes of a long-term professional within the trade. Listen for insights, interviews, and exciting news in the roofing industry today.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Hello and welcome to another Roofing Road Trips from RoofersCoffeeShop. This is Heidi Ellsworth and I am here today with a very special podcast. We are going to get some insights that you just don't hear every day. So we are here today with Mischa Fisher, the chief economist from Angi. Mischa, welcome to the show.

Mischa Fisher:
Great to be with you, Heidi. I'm really looking forward to this. This is going to be a lot of fun.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Yeah, I am too. Angi is just well-known everywhere and to be able to pull from all the data, all the information, all the studies that you do, I think is incredible. I'm so honored that you're here to share that with us today. Before we get started on this great podcast, I would love it if you would introduce yourself a little bit more thoroughly than I did and let us know kind of a little bit of your history, and exactly what you're doing with Angi.

Mischa Fisher:
Sure, absolutely. So for the listeners who are used to doing a lot of, I think, very, very tangible, real things in the field, building roofs, putting on siding, that sort of thing. It is a weird role to have thinking about what consumers are doing, but that's effectively what my role is at Angi is thinking about how consumers are spending their money. What are the big, long-term trends driving it? How are pros responding to that? What's going on in the marketplace as a result of this intersection of behavior between consumer spending and pro behavior? How are prices shaping up? What's going on with materials and supply chains and all of those different factors impacting the market?

Mischa Fisher:
So my role is broad-based thinking about all of those things at Angi. Before that, I was the chief economist for the state of Illinois looking specifically at how do we make our labor markets as efficient as possible in terms of removing bureaucratic barriers and making it easier for people to grow their businesses and hire, and get materials in the marketplace. I also moonlight as an applied statistics instructor at Northwestern University. So I sort of wear that hat of thinking about empirical methods and how you try and tell what's real and what's not real in terms of when you're looking at data.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Wow, I'm very impressed. That is very cool and Northwestern, what a great institution that is the fact that you're teaching there and getting that real life from all this next generation coming up. That has to just give you this full rounded view of things.

Mischa Fisher:
Yeah, it's really fun to sort of wear both those hats and to try and do the intersection of these things because there's not typically a lot of overlap between people thinking about applied statistics and people thinking about what's going on in the trade labor markets. And so that's what we're really trying to solve is making sure people really understand these things as well as possible. And being a resource for tradespeople in the field.

Mischa Fisher:
We want to be as helpful as possible for tradespeople in case you've got a question about what's going on in the market. You're probably not going to go out and hire a bunch of consultants to do it, but we want to make sure that that information is readily available for you if that's something that you're interested in understanding.

Heidi Ellsworth:
That's excellent, that's excellent. I'm really excited to get into that. So Angi's Skilled Trades in America report second version. Tell us a little bit about that, how it started, what it's talking about, and then we'll kind of dive deeper into it.

Mischa Fisher:
Absolutely. The succinct version is it is a dive into the trades. What goes on in a lot of news-making and scholarly analysis and looking at economic trends across all of these things, people tend to look at what bankers think and what manufacturers think and what CEOs think or what university professors think. But everything we live in and drive on and get made, it all was built by a tradesperson doing work in the field. And it's something that we don't think gets enough attention and doesn't show in the seriousness and respect that it should deserve. And so that's why we wanted to put out this annual look at the skilled trades in America. Who are they? What are they doing of work? What are their average ages? What's the gender breakdown? What are they earning? How high is job satisfaction? What are their expectations for their future?

Mischa Fisher:
And putting that all together so that people take the trade seriously. Something that we see all the time is what the perception of the trades are and it's changing, but there's been this stereotype for the last 20, 30 years that the tradesperson is kind of the rough around the edges, you know the plumber with the butt crack sort of thing. Whereas what we're trying to do is say, "Hey, these are very serious jobs. People make great money doing it. They love their work. They're innovative. They're entrepreneurial. And we need to understand what's going on in the skilled trades and people should take the sector really seriously." So that's what our report is doing is that deep dive across all these facets of the trades.

Heidi Ellsworth:
I love that. One of our big slogans with RoofersCoffeeShop is roofing respect. And we work every single day to bring that topic, that professionalism to show the rest of the world the amazing craftsmanship of the men and women who are involved in the trades. So to be able to really deep dive more from an analytical, statistical side of it just brings that one more step up. I love it.

Heidi Ellsworth:
So it was interesting because job satisfaction kind of talking about that, job satisfaction, as we know, getting more people in the trades is such a push for all construction. But job satisfaction remained remarkably high with 83% of the tradespeople either somewhat or extremely satisfied in their choice of work. When you see that and you think about what they went through with COVID basically being frontline, especially in the roofing, anything exterior they were very frontline out there. How did you see that? What were some of the responses?

Mischa Fisher:
Yeah, I mean, it's surprising, but on the other hand, it's not. Because we've seen the job satisfaction in the trades is already high and this was a challenging year for every industry. If your industry was hit hard by COVID and consumer demand went down, that was obviously materially very challenging. On the other hand, if your industry was boosted by consumer demand during COVID, that was also challenging because factories weren't ready, supply chains weren't ready, [inaudible 00:06:45] hiring wasn't ready, and everything was a challenge.

Mischa Fisher:
And so on both sides, it was challenging. And if you look at sort of general polling about job satisfaction, in the US it's only about one and three people really sort of feels engaged for with their work and really likes it. Just yesterday we saw new data that 3% of the entire American labor force quit their jobs in August, which is crazy. That's never happened before because people are so dissatisfied. But in the trades, job satisfaction actually went up and that's what we saw year over year. So it's overwhelmingly almost nine and 10 really enjoy their jobs and are happy they did which is very, very high.

Mischa Fisher:
And on top of that, if you look at the reason why. It's not the superficial things. It's not pay. It's not work hours. It's not that it's an easy job. None of those things are the primary driver. The primary driver of satisfaction among the people who are satisfied is that they find meaning and value in their work. And for finding that meaning and value in your work is what allows you to weather the storm when something unexpected happens is people really like it.

Mischa Fisher:
And at the end of the day, if you're in the roofing business, for example, you see a roof at the end of the day that you built. And that is that tangible sense of satisfaction is I think part of what drives it. It's also fun to do things with your hands, you feel confident. You can do things in relatively small teams and that's all harder. If you look at people who are sort of in a standard corporate job, there's a lot of navigating interpersonal dynamics and what's going on in different departments and priorities and things shift and things are out of your control. And there's not necessarily a tangible product at the end of the day and that's the exact opposite.

Mischa Fisher:
And so that's why one of the ways that we framed this report for tradespeople is saying this is a golden opportunity because the rest of the economy, all these industries are hemorrhaging people. And if you can find a way to really channel that, you can use this as an opportunity to really upscale the quality of your workforce.

Heidi Ellsworth:
You know it's really interesting because, and it's kind of a joke in the roofing industry, but it's so true. People will always say once you're in roofing, you never leave roofing. And I think that's somewhat the same with all the trades and with all the home improvement. Because there is a sense of not only accomplishment and working with your hands and doing those things, but the people. The people are pretty fantastic to be honest. That's a little bit on my insights just on being there, but we are having a labor shortage.

Heidi Ellsworth:
And so one of the things that I'm really curious about, I mean, this is a golden opportunity. We have all these people leaving other industries to get them in there. What did your report and what did you hear from some of the survey individuals on labor shortage? What did they have to say?

Mischa Fisher:
The labor shortage got worse unquestionably. There was already this chronic acute labor shortage that's been going on for years. It got about 10% worse this past year. I think it would've been even more of a problem if it wasn't already so bad, but it was already so bad it only had so much room to get even worse. So it definitely got worse. Pros universally thought that either hiring got harder or that the overall trade labor shortage got worse. A higher percentage of sort of businesses of pros sort of said, "Well, right now I'm currently okay at my staffing, but it was hard to get there. It was harder than it should have been."

Mischa Fisher:
And I think that that is part of the opportunity to really stand out as a businessperson in the skilled trades is when we look at how people are recruiting to their businesses A. There's still way too much word of mouth. The skilled trades is not pulling in the full demographic pool of what's out there. If you look at roofers, I think it's roughly 97% male. So if all you're doing is asking around your friends and you're saying there's a trade labor shortage, but you're missing half the population in your labor force, it's harder to be taken seriously because there's low-hanging fruit there.

Mischa Fisher:
Half the population is not represented in the labor force, pull more women into the trades. Make sure it's a conducive welcoming environment where people are going to enjoy that. So that's one thing is just stop using word of mouth as your recommendation tool, really try and expand the interest there.

Mischa Fisher:
The second thing is really highlight the job satisfaction in the skilled trades, but that's the second least cited thing that people cite when they say how they're recruiting is highlighting how happy they'll be in the work. People say, "Well, I offer above average wages." Sure. But if somebody's saying, "Well, I can go work at McDonald's," which is here in Colorado, we see starting salaries at McDonald's at 18 bucks an hour. So if you're in the roofing business, yeah, maybe you can offer 20 or a little bit more than that. But somebody saying, "Yeah, well, McDonald's is easy, it's social. I don't have to work as hard as being a roofer."

Mischa Fisher:
It's the job satisfaction too. So you can't just highlight that wage difference. You have to say, well, people really like this work. And that is something that we think the trades universally has to do is highlight how satisfying it is at the end of the day to have that tangible thing that you've built. And also how transferable that skill is to your personal life. If you get good in the skilled trades, you can save yourself a lot of money on your next remodel too. So that's another angle of it too.

Mischa Fisher:
And then the third thing is just using more digital tools. We did see in the report that skill tradespeople really kicked up their use of digital tools. And that's great for planning and quotes and project management, but there's a lot of room to improve how people are recruiting as well using digital tools, and being willing to spend a little bit on advertising and recruitment.

Heidi Ellsworth:
We have seen since the beginning of COVID the increase in digital just go off the charts. We had to. We have people working remote. Contractors now, home services need to talk to homeowners digitally online. There's a lot of changes that way. And the industry seems, it sounds like you're hearing the same thing in the report is that they have adapted. They've adapted quickly to be able to do it. And then contractors and the home service pros who are not adapting to that are kind of being left behind.

Mischa Fisher:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's like any other form of competition. It doesn't matter until it does. So people do have to be intentional about that. Right now there's so much organic demand that you might not necessarily have to adopt certain tools, but eventually you're going to wish that you had. Now, some tools can actually help you manage all that extra demand, which is its own sort of issue. But as a general rule, pay attention what your competitors are doing. And you don't have to be the first person to chase a trend, but you might not want to be the last.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Right. And honestly now is the time. With contractors going into this winter months, this is always the best time to actually reach out to the technology partners like Angi, and kind of understand how to grow your business. And we talk about this a lot on this podcast is it's about relationships and networking to figure out what's best for your company and how you're going to stay. Like you said, I kind of like that. I'm always an early adopter, but being a mid adopter is not a bad thing either just as long as you're adopting and moving forward.

Mischa Fisher:
Yeah, yeah. Exactly. That's a well-put.

Heidi Ellsworth:
So as you're kind of looking at this, I'm talking about shortages. So if we go from labor, I'd like to talk about material shortages and geez, what a year. What we're hearing is it's not looking much better going forward. What did you see?

Mischa Fisher:
Yeah, we saw universal issues with labor and material shortages, both. So in material shortages only about 15% of tradespeople said it wasn't a problem for them. So overwhelmingly the reality was issues with it. And the one thing about the trades that can be highly regional in terms of the impacts, we saw framing lumber and OSB as sort of the big universal ones. Roofing was up there. It was about fourth or fifth place in terms of the biggest impact. But some listeners might say, "Well, no roofing was the hardest" and others say, "Well, I might not have had any problem."

Mischa Fisher:
And the thing to remember is that if you're looking at the dealership networks and the manufacturing networks, you can end up with really regional effects where because of what's going on at the ports and what's going on at the manufacturers and what's going on with local distributors, you could have a pronounced shortage of windows in one market and then go over a state and their fine on windows, but roofing is the thing is the thing that they're out of.

Mischa Fisher:
And so it's very hard to generalize that sort of very precise, detailed story, but the overall big top line story is that the universe of tradespeople was dramatically impacted by that and some of those effects are still going on because they have so much consumer demand out there. Trillions of dollars in new home equity has been opened up and that's a lot of consumer spending that's still ready and waiting to be spent.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Right. And really understanding and helping to educate the homeowners ... Homeowners [inaudible 00:15:48] say homeowners, but building owners also on these material shortages. And I think now pretty much everybody knows there's material shortages out there, but for a long time they're wondering, "Why can't I get this? Why can't I get that?" And that's really hard for roofing contractors, for home service pros. What are you hearing along that line on the communication with homeowners and kind of working through that?

Mischa Fisher:
Pros have gotten smarter about communicating. So it was actually a little worse last year in terms of pros doing a poor job of communicating to homeowners. This year, when we look at homeowners and their sentiment, they're saying, "Well, my pro did a better job communicating on average." I would still say number one piece of advice, manage expectations. I don't think that's new for anybody to hear. Whether or not you're actually working that into your day, that should be a line item on your checklist when you're dealing with consumers is manage expectations. Make sure they're aware of what's going on.

Mischa Fisher:
If you communicate, you can avoid having the blame put on yourself because it won't be your fault. But if you don't communicate even something that's completely out of your hands, even if it's a total act of God, you could still be blamed for it by the consumer if you don't do a good job communicating. So make sure that that's definitely an intentional part of your process. If there's a risk that things go over time, be upfront about it and make sure that the consumer understands that because it also helps build trust too.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Yeah, it does. And I think that really kind of comes back to what we just talked about, the need for digital communications. Because how are you communicating quickly and accurately with your customers? And that has changed a lot. Before it used to just be, "Oh, we'll give them a phone call." Now it's text or it's even social media. I mean, all forms are being used.

Mischa Fisher:
Right. Yeah, exactly. You've got all the tools at you're disposal to communicate well. Make sure you're being intentional about it. And that's not always easy, especially if you're standing on a roof in the middle of the hot sun in the middle of Phoenix in July, the last thing you want to do is pull out your phone and try to deal with it. Then I understand that and don't mean to dismiss it, but it should be part of your intentional process and you should have it built into your routine.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Yeah. So I kind of hit on the big things that we're always, always talking about, labor materials and obviously recruitment and job satisfaction, which I still love that part of it. What are some other really big takeaways that you had from the report?

Mischa Fisher:
The biggest one for me that we haven't talked about is the entrepreneurial spirit in the trades. And that's something that we're like working on changing culturally. Because if you ask people who's an entrepreneur, they think of some tech bro in Seattle or San Francisco with this laptop at the coffee shop. And we're trying to change that. That's not to say that that person's not an entrepreneur. Clearly they are. Some people go on to start very large companies that way, but we want to make sure that people have a broad sense of it takes a lot of hustle and drive and creativity and entrepreneurial spirit for somebody to be successful in the trades and people do it. People hop into it.

Mischa Fisher:
You get people starting their own companies when they're in their early 20s and succeeding and then they're killing it by the time they're in their early mid-30s. And that can be a real short run to entrepreneurial business owning success that you don't necessarily see in other sectors of the economy. And it's very much in in your own hands.

Mischa Fisher:
It's very much can you sell people on the vision? Can you recruit people? Can you build and foster a culture? Because it's not in most cases really, really capital-intensive, you can do it yourself. You're not subject to the whims of investors or what's going on in global credit markets or anything like that. You can do this yourself. And so that's where we're really trying to sell people on the romance in the trades and that it's very entrepreneurial.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Yeah, I love that. I love the fact that Angi is taking this lead, the lead to get in front of people and to bring these messages of respect and entrepreneurial, and all the other things that help the trades gain people. And obviously customers is not as huge of a problem right now. There's a lot of spending going on out there.

Heidi Ellsworth:
What do you see as kind of some of the trends? I mean, going from the first report to the second report and what we've already talked about, but also just is there any interesting being an economist? Are there any interesting trends that you're seeing?

Mischa Fisher:
The interesting trends to me, the big ones are aging and what's going on with aging in the workforce. Roofers are actually a unique spot. Roofers aren't actually a particularly old group, but some trade skills, if you look at plumbers and pipefitters and electricians, then you end up with higher ages especially in sort of that general contractor range as well. And so some trades are going to be facing some sort of pretty severe issues with retirements and people aging out of it.

Mischa Fisher:
With roofers, it's about average. So it's not necessarily young, but it's roughly average with the population. And so that means that the average roofers may be a little less likely to say, "Hey, everybody's aging out of this business." But that to me is sort of the big story with the trades because as people retire out of the trades, that market share has to be picked up. And so that's where it's a real big opportunity for somebody to really nail the thinking around how they recruit and train and pull people into the business because you can gain market share. You can pick up as people exit the industry because that is something that's going to be hitting us I think pretty dramatically in the next 10, 15 years.

Heidi Ellsworth:
I think so too. I do think roofing tends to be a younger person's job just because of the toll it takes on the body. But when you look at the business owners, the roofing contractor company owners, we are seeing actually a lot of young people coming in and starting businesses to point of what you said earlier. That is something that is financially possible without a lot of huge investment or they can get into it and start working their way up.

Heidi Ellsworth:
We also, the roofing industry has also been working very closely with a number of universities, including Clemson and Colorado State. And so with your experience within the university ecosystem, where you're hearing feedback from construction management programs from young people going in there that they are interested in starting their own businesses. And they're very interested in the sub trades. Any insight and I know this is a little outside the report, but I'd just be interested in some of your insights that way.

Mischa Fisher:
It's a good point and it's maybe something that shouldn't be outside the report. Maybe that's something we need to put in there for next year because universities are wonderful options for certain things, but they're definitely not the universal choice. I don't mind personally saying that we've oversold people on the value of university. And I say that as somebody who's a university instructor. It can be really useful for certain things. And there's certain pathways where it can really pay off, but not universally.

Mischa Fisher:
And if you can sidestep that debt and you can sidestep a career that you don't particularly like, and you can sidestep a major that doesn't necessarily give you any marketable skills. And do that instead going into a field where you can start earning when you're 17 or 18-years-old as soon as you're out of high school, you can start earning, you can start a business, you can start all of those things. That's really, really interesting.

Mischa Fisher:
You asked that second point though about construction management. And I think they will probably see more of those programs kind of come into play. My guess is because technology is going to inevitably come in to help solve some of these shortage issues. And as you add technology, you add complexity and that's where you can have sort of a scientific discipline around management and process, and the entire construction flow.

Mischa Fisher:
That being said, residential construction, in particular, residential remodeling is a really tough nut to crack in terms of doing large scale automated, predictable things because everything is so unique. Every job is so custom. Labor is such a high part of it. And so I think those programs will come into play, but they'll probably be more on the commercial side than on the residential side on average.

Mischa Fisher:
I'm sure that some large residential modelers will find some use there. But I think probably a lot of it'll be sort of skewed towards commercial, industrial and new home construction, sort of large subdivisions, that sort of thing. I think that's where that skillset could really come to bear or on improving supply chains or material science around building technology too.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Robots on the roof. We have it all. Robots around the outside on the landscape. Who knows what's going to happen when innovation starts picking up? And we are seeing the same thing. We're seeing before you are always like, "Well, you need to go to vocational school or you need to go to the university construction management."

Heidi Ellsworth:
But now we're seeing young people coming out of entrepreneurship classes and they are starting their own businesses in roofing or in the trades because they're seeing such potential. Where before it just seemed like there was one thing. You're right. Now it's like people are making choices that fit what they want to do, which is probably why we have such high job satisfaction.

Mischa Fisher:
Right. Yeah, exactly. 100%.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Well, great. I love this. This is so great. And we will have links for this report on RoofersCoffeeShop so people can get it, they can read the whole report. It's fascinating. I love the fact that you're doing this every year so we can really start watching those trends even closer. Any last thoughts or anything else to share with our listeners?

Mischa Fisher:
We're here to be a resource for people. So if you want to follow this stuff, you can track it all down at angi.com/research. You can find it there. You can also feel free to track me down on LinkedIn if you want and shoot me a note. If you agreed with something, let me know. If you thought I was totally wrong and disagree with it, I'd love to hear that too particularly for any roofers that are in the Denver Metro area, it's always nice to hear from people. So just want to be a resource and to put out good figures. So that's what we aim to do and love to hear from people.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Yeah, and I would say the resources on these studies on what's coming out on trends, but also just on what we talked about earlier with really getting the digital tools and marketing resources. Angi is doing that across the board. It's really been fun and interesting to watch the growth of Angi and everything that's coming out of that. And how much is helping the car contractors and the pros out there.

Heidi Ellsworth:
So Mischa, thank you. Thank you so much for being here today. We truly appreciate it and are honored that you spend the time with us here on the Roofing Road Trip Podcast.

Mischa Fisher:
My pleasure. Thanks for hosting me. This was a lot of fun.

Heidi Ellsworth:
Awesome. Thank you and thank you all for listening. You can find all of our podcasts on rooferscoffeeshop.com under the Read Listen Watch initiative or of course on your favorite podcast channel. Be sure to subscribe, hit the notify so that you are notified every time there's a new podcast coming out. Thank you so much for being here today and we'll see you on the next Roofing Road Trip.

Megan Ellsworth:
Make sure to subscribe to our channel and leave a review. Thanks for listening. This has been Roofing Road Trips with Heidi from the rooferscoffeeshop.com.