Future Proof

See what Future Proof gives you

Real output from an actual run on the situation below, over a 10-year horizon. Part of the result is shown; nothing is reworded.

The situation

Running a two-van plumbing business. Twenty-two years in, two vans, three people including me. Work comes from word of mouth and a listing site that now takes a bigger cut every year and puts sponsored firms above me. My eldest has no interest in taking it on. I am 54.

Real run, 2026-10-08 — one of the tool's own built-in examples.

The question that matters

Is the underlying plumbing skill becoming more valuable per hour, or is the business model eroding faster than the skill compounds?

Headwinds

• Platform margin extraction — The listing site taking a larger cut each year and ranking sponsored firms above organic results is already compressing the return on customer acquisition through that channel.
• No succession or scale path described — With the eldest uninterested and the business at two vans, options to grow value through succession or sale depend on deliberate action and clear visibility into what the business would be worth to a buyer.
• Customer acquisition concentrating in platforms — If more customers default to platform search rather than personal referral, operators who have not built direct channels become increasingly dependent on terms they do not set.

What this means for you

The underlying skill is not the problem. Twenty-two years of physical, diagnostic, judgment-heavy work is genuinely hard to replicate and hard to replace. What is eroding is your capture of that value, because a platform you do not control is inserting itself between your skill and your customers and taking a larger share each year. That is a business-model problem, not a skill problem, and it is solvable in a way that automation risk to the core work is not. The succession question and the exit question are separate but both worth looking at now, while you have time and income to act rather than react. The most resilient version of the next ten years probably involves owning the customer relationship more directly, charging appropriately for the work only you can diagnose, and having a clear view of what the business would fetch if you wanted to sell it — so that staying or leaving is a choice, not a default.

One thing to do

Contact a sample of customers who have come to you through word of mouth. Ask them: how did you find me, would you refer me by name to someone who asked, and what has your experience been with platform-based tradespeople. Write down what you hear. This tells you whether your direct channel is strong enough to build on and what your actual competitive position looks like from the customer side.