Lead the Whole Industry
About this episode
Matt discusses Lowe's initiative to address the skilled trades shortage and the cultural perceptions surrounding it.
Lowe’s just assembled what’s being called the largest cross-sector skilled-trades coalition in the country — 75-plus members including NVIDIA, AT&T, Bank of America, and General Motors — aiming to help train a million tradespeople by 2035, against a projected shortfall of 2.1 million unfilled jobs by 2030. A company that sells the materials tradespeople use has an obvious stake in there being more of them. But what makes CEO Marvin Ellison’s move interesting to Matt is the diagnosis underneath it: part of the shortage is cultural. America spent decades selling college and white-collar work as the default path and quietly casting the trades as the consolation prize for people who didn’t succeed academically. Lowe’s isn’t just trying to widen the pipeline — it’s trying to change the status narrative. And changing the story, as Matt’s whole show argues, is often the real work. That’s the transferable lesson, whatever you sell. The most powerful growth strategy isn’t better selling — it’s leading your industry by bringing genuine value to the whole ecosystem and convening people around a cause that matters to you and to them. Do that, and selling gets easy, because you’re not…
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