While taking a stroll with Keiron after lunch today we happened to walk past a building site for a new leisure gym. Other than liking watching the diggers and dumper-trucks (I am a man after all), it reminded me of a thought I had a while ago about making more money from being in the building trade.

So to start off with, I am not a builder, have never trained to be a builder, but I can turn my hand to most DIY jobs and have done so ever since having my first house - this includes major work in our garden a couple of years ago. Now I’ve got my disclaimer out of the way the idea.

The Idea
Basically it was, get a load of graduates straight from university and train them in the the trades needed to build a house or similar building. Then pay them graduate wages, rather than minimum builders wage and get them cracking.

The idea being that if you pay educated people (It was Jack Dee a UK comedian that said builders always bring their own lunch to work as they are stupid, they basically need to know if they are coming or going by looking to see if their lunch box has any food in it!) good money (and you’ve not hired donkeys), they will work hard - today was no exception, one man in a digger, two watching him work!

Also why does every building site produce so much rubbish. Again if you have people committed and on a bonus to increase quality, decrease time and decrease waste, you’d save more money even taking in to account the increased wages and bonus.

Therefore you could either charge more for your building projects as they would come in on time, or just do more of them and earn more money (do 12 jobs a year instead of the 9 you would have done before).

Is it that easy? probably not, but it’s an interesting thought. I doubt any building companies would try it, but might be an interesting project for the Discovery Channel.