Highest Paying Trade Jobs No One’s Talking About (2024)

The amount of money you can make with a trade job will shock you. Now, a lot of people talk about the really well known trade jobs that everybody knows pay a lot of Money. Plumbing, H Vac, etc. But there are a bunch of high paying trade jobs that nobody talks about. In this video, we are going to break down exactly how eight hidden trades make an incredible amount of money and how you can copy their homework. So let's get into it. Really important point. The process to riches and freedom is three steps. Learn, earn, own. And I believe that you can start working for yourself, but then you learn how to earn a bunch more. And finally, you own a business. So in this video, we're going to break it down just like that. We're going to show you the three different levels. An employee. As a plumber, for example, you can vary how much you make. 65,000 to probably 150,000. Now if you own the business, you can make 300,000. As an owner operator. If you own the business and you have other plumbers, you can make millions. So we're going to scale up right alongside you. This one's fascinating. Septic truck owner. You've seen probably these trucks everywhere, but I bet it would surprise you to know that just one septic truck can make between 500,000 and a million dollars a year simply from pumping out people's septic tanks. And the best part, the demand for people needing this is high. How do we know? Well, the septic companies simply can't keep up with the amount of business that they have, which is not your opportunity. Now I know this because in preparing for this video, we actually decided to call a bunch of septic tank companies and find out how much they charge. Here's what we found out. Nine of the 12 companies never picked up the phone and never called me back, which is a good sign for the fact that they're busy. Three companies did pick up the phone, said that they're at least a month out as far as being booked. Of the three companies that answered their phones and gave me a price, the cost for one septic tank is anywhere from 700 to $900 for a thousand gallon tank. And that number actually goes if you need same day service, if you need after hours service, or if they need to travel more than an hour outside of their normal range. And typically after hours works. So you're on site. That takes you 20 to 25 minutes to pump a tank. After taking every time delay into account, one receptionist said that she typically schedules a two hour window for every septic tank that gets pumped out. And that on average, her company's septic tank drivers average anywhere between four and six jobs a day. That's a lot that quickly adds up, particularly if you keep in mind that if you wanted, this is easily a seven day a week business as people's septic tanks still overflow and need fixing over the weekend. Let's talk revenue. I think you could on average pump five tanks a day, which works out to 3,500 a week. Multiply that by 52 and you're making over a million a year in revenue. Now that's top line. But how much does it cost so you know how much you take home? Well, the biggest cost, of course, is the disposal of the waste. You can't just dump that all around. You have to put it in certain places, pumping five times a day. That's 1,000 bucks for disposal costs. Let's call it 200 bucks for fuel. Let's call it two hundred bucks for insurance in your car. That means costs all in annualizes about $436,000 a year, which means you're netting somewhere between 400 and $600,000 to you. Let's talk about my thoughts here and break down. Let's call this what sucks, what's kind of cool. Issue number one, seasonal business. If you're in an area where it's cold during the winter, you might have less business. Second, vehicles are expensive, so is their maintenance. So you got to make sure you factor that into your spreadsheet. A big pro is that restaurants need their grease traps pulled out regularly. If it was me, I'd probably be running over to restaurants and saying, let me come on a monthly basis and I'll haul it all away. Now, a bonus tip could be adding something like a Porta Potty rental business to this. So I'll pull your septic tank. I'll also input some Porta Potties, like we did in this business. We broke down every single aspect of that Porta Potty business. If you want to check that out too. Oh, important side note, guys, if you are vibing with this video more than a catfish flopping around in a mud hole, make sure to subscribe. Easier than catching a cold in December, I'm told. Plus, hopefully we make a bunch of money together. Hit that subscribe button. Okay, let's get back into it. On to number two, basement waterproofing technician. I figured you've never actually guessed this one before. What exactly do they do? Simple as it sounds, if you have a Basement, you really want to make sure that if anything goes sideways, if it rains a lot and you store stuff in there, it's clean. So most people waterproof their basements. It's an actual process with a technician that comes out. But how much can you realistically make doing that? Well, from our research, we found that on average, a basement waterproofing job can be completed in two days. Costs about 4,500 bucks. Let's say you take an average daily rate of 2,200. If you work six days a week, that's $686,000 over a year. If you don't work six days, you're still making high threes, low 400,000. But let's not carry it away. Let's look at the expenses. Let's say it costs you 300 bucks a day for material expenses, another hundred bucks in fuels. Finally, you're going to have maintenance and insurance on your equipment. Maybe another 200 bucks a day. Adding that all up, your total expenses is about $187,000 a year in this business. And even if the number comes in slightly higher, you're still talking about a couple hundred thousand dollars in profit. Now, what do I like, what do I not? Well, what I like about this is when it rains in this business, you probably actually see more demand. So offset that seasonality. The first one. One thing to be wary of though is that every job is going to be different. So that means you have to do custom RFPs for every single one. That's sort of a pain. I don't love that for businesses. And lastly for this business in particular, I'd want to do some add ons. Probably if I get inside a house, they're going to trust me to waterproof the basement. Probably want to have a few other things that I could sell them too because it's going to take a decent amount of time. You probably have a waiting period in between you waterproofing certain areas. So I might think about adding another one of these businesses we're going to talk about to it. Speaking of adding little something, I want to give you something that is going to make getting one of these trade jobs so much easier to start. So if you want one of these jobs that pays a bunch of money, a great interview is really important. So whether it's for a job or to become an owner, everybody's always interviewing. So HubSpot put together an interview kit that you can download from the link below. It's a collection of templates and resources to help you land your Next role. Like resume and cover letter templates, it'll help you come as your best self to the interview. It also has an 18 step checklist for pre interview prep and 8 tips on things to remember. I also really liked the 50 most commonly asked questions and scripts on how to answer them. Nobody wants to hear your life story when you get asked. So tell me about yourself. It's the worst question ever. Every interviewer asks it. So I recommend you download this. You'll be way ahead of everybody else and you can land your high paying trade job. Thank you HubSpot for sponsoring this video and making us some money. Next, Diesel technician. If you look at what they do, they provide mechanical maintenance and repair services to natural gas or diesel engines and compressions. Or in other words, they fix these bad boys. And that is a real specialty and it'll shock you once you start looking around how these machines are everywhere. Every single large construction company has these diesel compressors on site. So much so that there are simply not enough mechanics going around to work on that type of equipment. It's a perfect recipe for a high paying trade job. So how much can you make? Well, it seems like they charge $2,500 a day on average. They tend to work five day weeks. So adding that up, that works out to be 650k. Obviously if you could fill every single day. But the best part about this business is scale. You need a technician that costs about 80k a year, you pay for their fuel and maintenance and then this is a business that you can scale up with some ease. What would you need for this business to work? Well, you're definitely going to be want to be in a state where there's a lot of construction going on because this is dependent on people building things for the most part. What's really cool is it's easy to actually see right here. You can go online and look at states and cities that have the most construction in tandem. It looks like across the US So almost across the board, these operators are really not easy to find, which means if you become one and you train some others, you guys can grow up a pretty big company yourself. Now the biggest issue with this is the biggest opportunity, which is there aren't enough diesel mechanics out there. That means that you'd have to do a job of helping either attract and give better incentives to them or you train them. This industry is growing, which is cool too, about 8% a year. And it looks like it's much more competitive than general mechanics, which I like now because there's demand all over the place. You could also move around the country a lot. You could work in a garage, dealership, an airport, or even in your own private business. You might want to try different industries if you do this. Now there's one downside to this, which is it can be dangerous. Flammable chemicals, powerful tools, definitely some workers comp risk here. This is also a very manual labor business. Septic tank pumping. And I should know this since here's a cut of me pumping porta potties is not actually that labor intensive. It doesn't take a lot of work from a heavy labor perspective, but this does. So you probably got to be a pretty powerful dude or chick to do this. Next one. Boilermakers. What is this? These guys assemble and maintain boilers and other large vessels that hold gases and liquids. Now they have to work often to go to work sites for a long period of time. You only need a high school diploma in order to do it. And they typically learn their trade through apprenticeships. The median annual salary for this job is about $71,000. But that goes up pretty aggressively to $150,000. They make anywhere from 75 to $200 an hour. And fixing the boilermaker of one house can range from 7,000 to $10,000 depending on the capacity to replace a boilermaker is a whole different thing and way more expensive. The most interesting part about this is it depends on what type of boiler. So we're not going to get too technical here, but you can basically, even within the industry, if you're licensed and the higher end ones, you can make more money. How long does it take to install a boiler? A couple days on average. So let's just say you only do two in a week, averaging 7,000 bucks. That's $15,000 a week or $825,000 a year. I think what you're making here is somewhere between 400 to $800,000 a year top line revenue with you actually executing the installation and the repair on the boilermakers. Now of course, remember, with all of these businesses, we can learn it, then we can increase our earnings, and then finally we can build a business around it. Because you have a trade as the owner of the business, you immediately cut down your costs so much and you can grow a multi million dollar business this way. But maybe start with making a bunch of money by just doing the job. All right, do I like it and what sucks? Let's get into this portion. Let's talk about the cons. First, one requires a lot of travel, which I guess is a pro. If you're into traveling all around. If you're in a big city, you have to travel less. If you're in a rural area, you're not going to have as many jobs centralized. That's the first thing. The second one is these are transactional jobs. You're probably not going to be getting more work, more and more work, more work from the same people, unless you have a big construction or commercial contract in which they're putting you into all of their locations. This is also a business where I like you guys working for somebody else first because then you'll figure out how do they get clients, how do they get more of them, how do you steal some of their homework? So this isn't something that I would probably jump right in and start my own business in unless I was actually a member of this trade. Next one. Millwrights. Millwrights work on dismantling or reassembling machinery to move it into factories or plants. Wild. They like calibrate, adjust it, make sure it meets all the specs. You basically need a high school diploma and like a three or four year apprenticeship to get to the top of the trade. It's fascinating is they make anywhere from 60 to $130,000. And the industry is growing like crazy, like 8% a year. So if you are the owner operator of this business and you are a millwright, you're making about $208,000 a year. Let's say you doing everything. How much does it cost you to run this business? Let's do some public math. All right? We got insurance, let's call that about $10,000 per year. Materials and supplies, 1,000 bucks a month. 12K per year. Equipment maintenance and repairs, about 5,000 per year. Transportation, let's call it 24K a year. So we're sitting right around 50ish thousand dollars a year, which means that your estimate is somewhere around 150,000 do you're making by being the owner operator of this business. Now, you might not think $150,000 seems like a ton of money to do this, but this is with nobody else in the business. No complications. You go and do the work and you take home six figures, which I thought was interesting. Of course, if this was me, I would scale this bad boy up. So let's talk about some of the pain points that I see. Well, it does require a lot of different tools for every job. So you're going to have drill bits and flap discs and mig wire and taps. But you can buy this as Part of the job and include it in the cost so that doesn't have to go to you. High demand. This is an industry that has a lot of demand, especially in construction. The other thing that I was thinking about with this is, you know, diverse work opportunities. You can work on a ton of different types of machines. You could become a hyper specialist in it too. Anytime you hyper specialize, you make more money. High startup costs. This is true for this business because you do have to have all these types of tools, equipment and training. Then you have what's called capex, which is startup costs. Skilled labor is hard too, like the other industries. This is why you guys make a bunch of money in it. Skilled tradespeople, hard to find. And then finally getting adequate insurance, really important and can be expensive. You saw that it's still a six figure business with you just working on it. But things to note. Let's talk about the next one. Elevator technician. This one always cracks me up because I'm like, really? Are there enough of them? Well, the answer is not really enough of them. We need more. You probably get annoyed when your elevator's out of service if you live in a building, right? But think about this. The maintenance that they have to do on that, not just to actually function, but for the city, is sizable. This job pays $97,000 on average. And what's interesting is the industry is growing. So technicians earn 75k to about $130,000. And a lot of them do substantial government contracts where they then end up making more than $200,000 per year. What I like about this, very little startup costs. And for most of these businesses, you can get rolling for somewhere like you know, a couple thousand bucks with the right equipment to start. So in this business we're making somewhere between 97,000 and 200,000 just for being an employee in this business. Then if we become an owner operator, I think you're doubling that. But how much do we actually take home with expenses? Well, it looks like to start one of these businesses is actually not that much money. Typical business startup costs like insurance and website set up. All of that aside, It'll take about $20,000 in equipment, plus let's add another 20,000 to 30,000 on top for typical business expenses. So we're talking about 50k to get this thing rolling and to run it for one year. What's interesting about this business is it doesn't have the big trucks and all the insurance on top of it. And you don't have supplies that you have to keep Reusing and you don't have any costs like waste disposal. So the margins on this business are actually much, much higher. I do like that about it. Now let's go to what sucks and what I like. We've already talked about low startup costs. That's a major pro. The second pro, as I think about it, is look at these customer retention rates. Once a customer uses you, it looks like they don't break up with their elevator operator very much, which makes sense unless you really fuck up. Third is predictable income streams. They have to have you come in and check off their certification in order to be able to keep using their elevators. So that's built in. Recurring revenue also looks like demand is continuing to be high and it's a recession resistant business. I think if you had a really good referral program in place for your customers to tell their friends about your product, you could probably continue to grow just by showing up on time. Cons is high liability. You could kill somebody if you suck at this. Insurance premiums are also going to be high for that reason. Now for this business you are going to have to have a bunch of licenses and certifications. So you need to make sure because it's highly regulated so that you understand what those cost and how hard they are to get. It's really going to depend on city and county. So I won't go into too much detail. The second thing that I would do if I was going to grow this bad boy is I would get in with a ton of builders and property managers. Those are your clients and I think if you got in with a few of them over time you would continue to grow. You're going to also need to have the same problem in every other one, which is labor and making sure you find more people like you. Unless you're going to own or operate it and make a couple hundred thousand dollars yourself. But this is a cool business. I like the recurring revenue. And lastly, street parking lot light maintenance. Wild. Tens of thousands of street lights in every city. And some are owned and maintained by the city, but a lot of them are by private installers and maintainers. The great thing about this business is that people need to fix it ASAP for security reasons. And they need it constantly as these things run out. The services that I do are light installation, light repairs, retrofitting light to led, ongoing maintenance. And the numbers for this business are really interesting. If you were going to replace one pole light, that's 3k timber or steel, 5k install costs for one like this, 5k. So that's like $15,000 for just one series of lights. Looks like it takes about two to four hours per job. In some places they charge you 1000 bucks to replace a light bulb, which is wild. We did our homework on this one. I looked up a bunch of different sites and what it costs to replace light bulbs. You can have a contract to go in and replace all the light bulbs. Let's say in a hotel unit and industrial or residential building like this, that on average is $25. A light bulb seems like a lot, but I guess takes up some time. Now if you're going to actually do the industrial city lights, that can be anywhere from 150 to $700, which I thought sounded insane. But here's the reasons why it takes that long. When I go and look at some of the contracts out for. Let's say in this instance, this is in brook, these require you to get up on a lift. They require you to actually usually have a two man team. And sometimes those bulbs have custom orders. So you have to go and you have to order the bulbs ahead of time. You have to host them at your location for a period of time. So that's why this is more expensive than what you might think. So in this instance, if we go the super low end and we say that you're doing about 800 bucks a day, that's about $208,000 in revenue. If we take 260 working days a year and we blow it out now, on average, if you're doing stuff for the city, this is going to be closer to 500 to $700 a light bulb. So we're getting to a business that is now doing 702. If we could say that we're actually doing thousand dollar light bulbs, that's a $2 million a year business at that level. Now the part that's interesting is of course replacing the light bulbs isn't even the most important part. It's also wiring them correctly and making sure that you understand maintenance overall of a lighting grid. The expenses on this aren't nothing though. When I was looking up at them, it looks like truck upkeep and maintenance for a business like this is sizable. So you're going to have, let's call it a couple thousand bucks a month in you both renting a truck and having insurance and maintenance on top of it labor in this amount. Well, if you're the laborer, it's free. And that means that, that, you know, 200 to $400,000 is going into your pocket. But Remember, these people make about $97,000 to $130,000 a year. So you're going to have about one third of all the money you make go to labor costs, insurance, let's call it a couple thousand dollars a year, not a month. And then you're going to have to have somewhere to host those light bulbs, the truck, all of the tools, et cetera. You're going to have to have some type of rent. So depending on what that looks like, I don't know, let's say $50,000 a year, which means your annual expenses are from an owner operator going to go from somewhere to 100,000, all the way up to, if you were doing a $2 million business a year, probably $900,000 in total costs. But that means this business is operating at about a 30 to 50% profit margin. So $150,000 to, let's call it about just shy of a million dollars if you get all the way up to 2 mil. That's why I like this business in particular that I think if you start start out as an apprenticeship in this business, it looks like the highest paying trades business that nobody thought about. There you have it. All of these trades are huge opportunities right in front of us, but nobody talks about them. And not only that, it's important work. These jobs are the backbone of our society. They are businesses that don't just change your life, but they change our communities. Let me know which one in the comments you think is your favorite. Also let me know where you think we got the numbers wrong and where you would do something differently. The only way that we build bigger communities is by getting our hands a little dirty. So I want to hear from you guys.