There is a chapter in Hands Up called "The Course They Were Told To Stay," and of everything in the book, it is the chapter I get the most mail about — because every owner who reads it recognizes someone. Usually their own advisor. This essay is the standalone version of its argument, for the people who haven't read the book yet.
What the industry was actually buying
Look at what the typical trades contractor was paying their agency for in 2024 and 2025: a WordPress website on the same architecture the industry had used for a decade. A blog post a month, written by a junior copywriter. Traditional SEO — title tags, meta descriptions, header tags, internal linking — the same checklist that agency was running in 2018. A monthly dashboard pulled from Google Analytics and the call tracker.
By every standard of the previous decade, that service was professional, competent, and adequate. By the standards of the era we are entering, it is none of those things. The playbook wasn't wrong when it was written. It's wrong now, and the people selling it know that last part quietly, or haven't let themselves ask.
Meanwhile, the ground moved
While that playbook was being renewed annually, the competitive environment around the average contractor transformed. Private equity roll-ups went from a regional phenomenon to a national one, buying up HVAC, plumbing, and electrical companies at scale. Major retailers — Home Depot, Lowe's — kept building out their home service offerings. Utilities launched HVAC service programs on the strength of their existing customer relationships. Institutional investors bought single-family rental properties in volumes that are changing who the customer even is.
So the independent contractor in 2026 is competing against private equity, national retail, energy companies, and institutional landlords — while running on a technology layer that was aging when it was installed. That is the pressure map. And the striking thing, the thing that made me write the chapter, is that most of their advisors were not telling them about it.
Why "stay the course" always sounds wise
The advisors said what advisors whose livelihood depends on the old playbook always say: optimize your rankings, run your ads, manage your reviews, train your call-takers, keep the referral program going. Stay the course.
Understand the incentive and you understand the advice. The people who built careers on the previous decade's playbook cannot tell you it has expired without expiring themselves. It is not usually malice. It is the most human thing in the world: identity and income welded to a way of working, defending itself. That is precisely why the advice feels so trustworthy — it is delivered with total sincerity by people who need it to be true.
The most expensive advice in the trades right now is also the most comfortable: stay the course. Nobody mentions that the course itself moved.
The test for every advisor you pay
You do not need to become a technologist to protect yourself. You need one habit: make every advisor show you what they are doing about the shift in their own business. What have they automated in their own delivery? What do they run in production, not in a slide? What did they build before clients demanded it? The ones with real answers earn the relationship. The ones who answer with adjectives have told you the renewal decision.
Defying that advice has a cost too — I wrote about the loneliest part of being right early because comfortable consensus is precisely what makes "stay the course" so easy to sell. And what leaving the course actually built is now public: the 320-to-38 rebuild.
The full chapter — including what we did inside CI Web Group during those same years instead of staying the course — is free to read, like the whole book: start with chapter eight, and if you want the sequel to its argument, chapter nine, "Why The Industry Is Stuck," picks up where it ends.