Over the past few years, a familiar career pitch has taken over TikTok, YouTube, and dinner-table advice: skip the college debt, learn a trade, and lock in a six-figure paycheck. Plumbing became the poster child. Burst pipes don’t get outsourced. Toilets don’t get automated. The story was simple.
The video above tries to punch holes in the hype. The argument is not that plumbing disappeared. It is that Wall Street showed up.
Private equity firms and multi-trade platforms have been buying local plumbing and HVAC shops at scale, on the order of hundreds of mechanical, electrical, and plumbing companies since 2022. The playbook is familiar: keep the family name on the truck, keep the neighborhood branding, and centralize pricing, dispatch, marketing, and labor policy behind the scenes. From the curb, it still looks like competition among independent shops. On the org chart, it is a roll-up.
In that model, the old ladder of apprentice, journeyman, master, then buy out the owner gets replaced by a corporate pay band. The video explains that many technicians in these residential service platforms top out around the mid-$30s an hour unless they lean into commission-heavy sales: quotas, memberships, and equipment replacements. Six figures, in that world, is less a craft wage than a sales number.
That critique of PE-backed home services is fair, but there’s more to the story as well.
