Ford’s US dealers have around 5,000 technician jobs they can’t fill. Some of them pay up to $120,000 a year.
A report published a few weeks ago puts America’s need at around 1.7 million skilled trades openings every year.
In the UK, construction alone needs to find 41,200 extra workers a year between now and 2030.
I’ve been looking at those numbers alongside the businesses I work with and they point to something uncomfortable.
If your growth depends on skilled people, you’re not going to hire your way to the next level.
The constraint isn’t your customers any more. It’s how many qualified people you can put in front of them.
Why paying more won’t fix it
The natural response is to pay more. A better rate, a newer van, a signing bonus for anyone who can start next month.
Ford’s dealers are already offering up to $120,000 and the jobs are still empty. The problem isn’t the offer. It’s that there aren’t enough qualified people to go round.
So every business in your sector ends up bidding for the same small pool.
When you win, you usually win someone from a competitor - and they’ll be back on the market the next time somebody bids a little higher. The total number of skilled people doesn’t grow. They just move around and each one seems to cost more.
And this isn’t a bad year that will pass. The same report found that nearly one in four skilled trades workers is 55 or older. The people retiring over the next decade are the experienced ones and the pipeline behind them is thin.
If your plan for the next two years includes a line that says recruit five more engineers, it’s worth asking how many you actually managed to add in the last two.
The team already exists
The skilled people you’re trying to find haven’t disappeared. They’re already employed. They turn up on Monday, they’re supervised by someone who knows what they’re doing and they hold the qualifications your customers ask for.
They just work for another business.
Somewhere within an hour of you there’s a company with, say, fifteen or twenty qualified people, a supervisor or two, a set of accreditations and a loyal customer base. Buying it would add more skilled capacity in one deal than most businesses manage to recruit in five years.
Very often, the owner of that business is ready for a conversation. I wrote recently about the owner a few miles away with no successor. A lot of those businesses are exactly the team you can’t hire.
When you can’t hire the people, you can still acquire the team.
But won’t people just leave after the deal?
Some will, but the question is why those people will leave. In my experience, people rarely walk out because the names on the share certificate have changed. They leave because of what changes next. Their pay gets “harmonised”, their manager is replaced, the way they’ve always done the job is suddenly wrong, or the company they joined disappears into yours overnight.
Most of that is in your control. Keep the supervisors who hold the team together. Keep the name over the door if the customers know it. Change things slowly and only where it makes the work better for them, not just tidier for you.
I would also say that people who leave in the first year are usually the ones who were already on their way out - or wouldn’t adapt to new ownership. The ones who stay get something they didn’t have before: a bigger business behind them, more work and more ways to progress.
What you’re actually buying
This changes what you look for in a target.
If you were buying profit, you’d start with the accounts. When you’re buying capacity, you start with the people. How many are qualified and in what? Who supervises them, and will that person stay? Which accreditations, approvals or framework places come with them? How much more work could they take on if they had it?
A business with modest profits and a strong, well-led team can be worth far more to you than its accounts suggest, because it solves the one problem money hasn’t been able to solve.
Your hiring gap
There’s one figure that tells you whether this applies to you and you already have it.
Look at your plan for the next two years and count how many qualified people it needs. Then look at the last twelve months and count how many you actually added, after leavers.
The gap between those two numbers is your real growth ceiling. If it’s been the same size or bigger for more than a year - you’re not looking at a recruitment problem. You’re looking at a reason to buy.
Ford can’t pay its way out of 5,000 empty jobs, but you may be able to buy your way out of five.
All the best,
Gavin
P.S. Building a group by acquisition is one of the routes we work on with owners in our Growth Partnership. If your hiring gap has been stuck for a while and you’d like to talk through what a first acquisition could look like, book a call with me here.
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Ford figures from Ford CEO Jim Farley on the Office Hours: Business Edition podcast, November 2025. US figures from Jobs for the Future, “The State of America’s Skilled Trades”, September 2026. UK figure from CITB, Construction Workforce Outlook 2026-2030, June 2026.
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