When Charles Covey looks for opportunity, he doesn’t scan headlines about AI or consumer tech. He looks at businesses most entrepreneurs ignore entirely: metal shops, infrastructure contractors, and construction-adjacent companies that have quietly generated cash for decades.

That perspective comes from experience. Over 26 years, Covey has been involved in more than $5 billion in construction, development, and entrepreneurial projects across Texas. He built a statewide construction company from zero to 125 employees with no outside capital, worked on a Berkshire Hathaway–backed mixed-use project valued at more than $1 billion and now sees nearly $500 million in potential deal flow across Texas growth markets over the next two years.

Today, Covey is focused on a different phase of entrepreneurship: acquiring and optimizing existing businesses through the Blue Collar Business Fund, which targets profitable blue-collar companies facing generational transitions.

Over the next five to ten years, an estimated 10 million baby boomer–owned businesses will change hands. Many are profitable, durable, and deeply embedded in their communities. They are also chronically under-optimized.

“That gap,” Covey says, “is where the opportunity is.”

Here’s what he believes most founders get wrong about scaling blue-collar businesses and how to fix it.

Related: Blue-Collar Jobs That Pay 6 Figures

Hard work gets you started. Systems let you scale

Covey’s entrepreneurial instincts showed up early. He ran a lawn-mowing business at seven and was framing houses in the Texas heat by 16. He loved the physical reality of building something from nothing and still does.

But experience taught him that grind has limits.

“Hard work will take you to a certain revenue level,” he says. “After that, it actually becomes the thing that holds you back.”

In his experience, many blue-collar businesses stall before $10 million in revenue. The owner works longer hours, hires more people and still feels stuck. The problem is rarely the work itself. It’s how information moves through the company.

Fix information flow before you add headcount

When Covey evaluates a business, he doesn’t start with marketing or hiring plans. He starts with communication.

“If your field staff have to call someone at the office to find out where a job site is, you can’t scale,” he says.

Many profitable businesses still run on text threads, cell phones and individual laptops. Files are scattered. Departments operate in silos. The founder becomes the clearinghouse for every decision.

Before chasing growth, Covey focuses on:

• Centralizing files
• Standardizing communication, internal and external
• Ensure every person knows where to efficiently find the information for their tasks
• Making information accessible across departments
• Securing data so it lives in one system, not dozens of devices

“When information flows cleanly,” he says, “the business has a chance to get out of its own way.”

Related: Mike Rowe Just Made the Ultimate Pitch for Blue Collar Entrepreneurs: ‘I Am Addicted to Indoor Plumbing’

Build a practical tech stack, not a flashy one

Covey isn’t interested in tools that look impressive on a pitch deck. His goal is speed, clarity and reliability for teams doing real work.

Within the first 90 days of acquiring a company, his team installs what he calls a blue-collar tech stack. That typically includes:

• Project management tools crews actually use
• Web based frameworks for each job role, with daily, weekly and monthly tasks clearly outlined
• Well managed, secure filing processes for the mountains of data from contracts to construction plans to safety briefings
• Simple dashboards for management visibility into jobs, costs, timelines and KPIs

“These businesses don’t need Silicon Valley software,” he says. “They need systems that support execution.”

Choose businesses with moats, not just demand

Not every blue-collar business is a fit. Covey avoids trades that depend on long licensing pipelines or have become overcrowded with private equity money.

Instead, he looks for businesses with:

• High specialization
• Strong reputation or experience-based moats
• High revenue per employee
• Skills that are difficult to replicate but can be trained internally in less than 6 months

“Anyone can start a lawn-mowing company tomorrow,” he says. “That’s not a moat.”

The sweet spot is a business that has done essential work for decades and can grow without structural bottlenecks.

Own the moment when everything becomes your responsibility

Covey traces a turning point in his career to his early 30s. After weeks of nonstop rain stalled his construction projects, cash tightened and stress mounted. Sitting alone in a piece of equipment on a muddy job site, he realized there was no one to blame and no one coming to rescue him.

“I was the problem,” he says. “And that meant I was also the solution.”

That shift in ownership changed how he approached systems, risk and growth. Within a few years, the business took off.

“Once you stop looking for someone else to fix it,” he says, “everything changes.”