You Have 97,193 Competitors in Pennsylvania
That's the number of construction businesses in this state with no employees. One person, one van, no payroll. The Small Business Administration publishes it in its Pennsylvania profile, built from the Census Bureau's count of businesses without payroll.
For scale: Pennsylvania has another 25,829 construction businesses with one to nineteen employees, and 2,337 with twenty to four hundred and ninety-nine. So about four out of five small construction businesses in this state are one person working alone. Nationally it's 2.9 million of them.
Every one of those 97,193 can do roughly what you do. Most of them are as good at it. A fair number are cheaper.
That is the actual competitive situation, and almost nothing written about getting more work as a handyman mentions it.
First, the thing you've probably been told
You may have read that handyman work is one of the fastest-growing side hustles going. It's a popular line right now and I looked into it, because I nearly wrote a post on it myself.
It doesn't hold up. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects general maintenance and repair workers to grow 4% between 2024 and 2034 — its own description is "about as fast as the average for all occupations." Median pay was $48,620. That's an ordinary trade with ordinary growth, not a boom.
And the "fastest-growing side hustle" lists that say otherwise are ranked by Google search volume — how many people typed the phrase, not how many started or earned anything. Handyman isn't on those lists either. The top entries tend to be content creation and online tutoring.
Here's what is true, and it's the more useful fact. Census figures show businesses with no employees have grown faster than businesses with employees in nearly every year from 2012 to 2023 — averaging 2.7% a year against 1.1%.
The work isn't growing unusually fast. The number of people selling it alone is.
I'll be careful here, because those two numbers measure different things — one counts jobs in an occupation, the other counts businesses without payroll — and I'm not going to multiply them together and hand you a ratio that looks more precise than it is. But the direction is not ambiguous, and you can feel it on every quote you lose.
What that means for how you compete
You are not going to win these 97,193 on skill. Not because you aren't skilled — because the customer can't see skill before they hire you. They're looking at a phone, comparing three names, and every one of those names says reliable, honest, and free estimates.
So you win on the things the customer can see before they've met you. There are three, they're boring, and none of them is the one people spend money on first.
They can find you when they look. For most of these jobs that means Google Maps, not your website. I've written the field-by-field guide to that and the Philadelphia trades playbook covers the rest — I'm not repeating either here, because the point of this post is which fight you're in, not the moves.
They can reach you when they try. This is where most solo operators lose work they'd already won, and they lose it silently. You're under a sink, the phone rings, it goes to voicemail, and the caller phones the next name. You never learn it happened. I've put numbers on what that actually costs over a year.
You look like a business. The evidence I keep coming back to on this is Stanford's, from 2002: 2,684 people were asked to judge whether real websites were credible, and the look of the site came up in 46.1% of what they wrote. It's an old study and I'd rather quote it accurately at 46.1% than repeat the inflated version that circulates. Nearly half is enough to act on.
The part the other results won't tell you
Search "do I need a website for my handyman business" and you'll find the question asked over and over in Reddit threads and Facebook groups, answered by other tradespeople who disagree with each other, plus a few confident pages written by companies that sell websites.
I sell websites. So take the next paragraph accordingly.
For a lot of those 97,193, the entire online presence is a profile on a lead platform — Angi, Thumbtack, Yelp, one of the others. It works, in the sense that jobs come from it. But it's worth being clear about what you have there: you're renting. The profile ranks, not you. The reviews live on their system. The enquiry arrives on their terms, and if they change those terms, or their pricing, or their algorithm, nothing on your side changes to protect you — because there is no side of yours.
Go and read what your platform's terms actually say about how an enquiry gets distributed. I'm not going to tell you what's in them, because that varies and I'd be guessing. Read them. It's the most informative twenty minutes available to you this month.
The alternative isn't abandoning the platforms. It's making sure that when someone hears your name — from a neighbour, off the side of your van, from a job you did on their street — there's somewhere to land that belongs to you.
When a website is not what you need first
Here's where I talk myself out of work.
If you're doing under about twenty thousand a year on the side, still figuring out what you want to specialise in, and every job you've had came from someone you know — do not buy a website from me or anyone else. Claim your Google Business Profile - I will help you in doing this, I'll get you ten real reviews, and put a proper voicemail greeting with with a missed call text back. That's all you need to start and this will do more for you this year than any website.
If your phone rings from strangers, you're turning work down, and you're losing quotes to outfits you know you're better than — that's a different situation. At that point the thing costing you money isn't the absence of a site. It's that people are finding you, forming an opinion in about three seconds, and calling someone who looked more like a business.
I take three builds a month. I'd rather tell the first person to come back in a year than sell them something they can't yet use.
What to do, in order
Google Business Profile, completely filled in. Free. Do it this week.
Fix how you get reached. Somebody or something answers the phone during working hours. That can be a person, an answering service, or an AI that picks up and books the job — I've written honestly about which suits whom, including when the answer is none of them.
Ten reviews that describe the actual work. Not "great service." "Replaced the stack in our Fishtown row home in a day."
Then somewhere to land that you own. Not a brochure. Your service area in plain place names, a tappable number, real photos of your jobs, and a price or an honest reason there isn't one.
Keep the platforms running the whole time. Leaving money on a channel that works, to make a point about ownership, is a decision made with your ego rather than your calendar.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is a website necessary, or is a Facebook page enough?
For your first year, a Facebook page plus a complete Google Business Profile is genuinely enough, and I'd rather you spend the money on tools. What a Facebook page can't do is show up when somebody searches your name after a neighbour recommends you, or hold a service-area page that says which neighbourhoods you cover. When you start losing work between the recommendation and the call, that's the signal.
Why don't more handymen have their own websites?
Because for a long time they haven't needed one — the work came from referral and platforms, and both still work. The situation that changed is how many other people are doing the same thing. When the customer has four names instead of one, whatever makes you look like an established business starts deciding the outcome.
Should I stop paying for leads?
Not on my say-so, and not while they're profitable. Work out what a booked job from that channel costs you and what it's worth. If the number works, keep paying it. The argument for owning your own presence isn't that paid leads are bad — it's that renting all of it leaves you with nothing to fall back on when the rent changes.
Not sure which of the two situations you're in? Tell me how many jobs you turned down last month and where your work comes from. If you're the first case, I'll tell you to go and do the free things and come back next year — that answer costs you nothing and I give it more often than the other one. Start a conversation →