Can innovation solve the manpower and labor shortage problem?
A severe labor shortage will continue to plague the construction industry, driving up construction costs further. A recent report from the Associated General Contractors of America shows that 79% of construction companies want to hire more employees this year, but the industry is only estimated to grow its workforce by .5% annually for the next 10 years. That is hardly enough to make up for the 600,000 jobs lost since the last recession.
The founder has been able to study the industry for many years alongside her family that remains in the workforce and we’ve been able to determine with our current technology that there are many companies and workers who experience downtime. At least 75% of the companies that sign up with us select they experience some type of downtime on projects and workers as well in our sign up forms that they’ve been affected by either weather, project timelines, Covid19, and 28% of construction firms are experiencing project delays or disruptions due to a shortage of construction materials, equipment, or parts. https://www.agc.org/
We need to be able to utilize this workforce when this occurs.
We know what you’re thinking there’s just no advancements or innovation that could touch this problem, but what if you’re wrong, just what if we did? We have pitched to several venture capital firms that specialize in construction and products like ours and some pretty well-known staffing firms that agree we found what it’s going to take to bring relief to this manpower problem. On one occasion an investor says “Wow you did it, this is it, your team has brought innovation unlike any other tech start-up in this space and that amount of disruption is amazing” and expressed his excitement for these changes in the industry that’s so badly needed.
The founder took a deeper dive into the problems by testing our sign-ups through an easy form that could allow us to collect those entries and have many conversations with contractors and workers across the country, we realized there is so much innovation that can be done that nobody has even thought about yet. At least from what we’ve researched. We took the traditional route and followed the gig opportunity in this market but after a thought-out and long evaluation, we discovered it’s not the answer the industry was seeking. Although it’s a great vitamin the industry uses it’s not the overall pain reliever they are looking for and, to be honest, it’s too much risk. The founder said, during mid-2020 “we can go much bigger and pivot and really solve this problem.”
Our upcoming advancements and recent partnership with a new software company gave us a chance to build out a HardHats 2.0 that is pretty impressive. With our collected data and customer discovery interviews, we realized we had a massive opportunity to scale unlike anyone in this market when it comes to software management specifically for manpower and crews. Without spilling the beans we can say that our marketplace application gives contractors, workers foremen, and construction companies a solution to lend and borrow crews through one simple search and crew listing in addition to foremen finding open crews and building crews on-demand. Our goal has been, we want to be manpower solutions. This will save contractors near 50% of their human capital cost in many ways. Not only will this allow contractors to keep the crew busy when any project delay occurs they are not losing the crew in the meantime and contributing to the shortage each year through these industry pain-points.
Through one simple transaction between each user will seamlessly give them so much relief and assurance that we can protect the crew and coverage and for crews to go back to the company to complete projects at the same time. If you are following, what we’re saying is this has a staggering opportunity to solve this massive problem. We will still offer our current solution by matching workers and crews since we found this will be a perfect ice breaker for contractors and workers to adopt our new technology. Now that we’re ready for the market and given our extraordinary efforts to the industry our solution couldn’t come at a better time. We know that our company is being watched by some big industry leaders and we are excited to deliver this innovation and have our app up and running very soon. Here’s a sneak peek of our upcoming project.
