Today we’d like to introduce you to Johanna Schuster-Craig.
Hi Johanna, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
I spent twenty years in higher education before I started a handyperson service. My friends were telling me that they couldn’t find anyone to work on their homes, and even if they did find someone, a lot of the time those folks would just walk away. They couldn’t understand it. I was tired of being a professor at MSU, so I decided to give up a tenured position and start a business.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Nothing is smooth about starting a business! We have potential clients galore due to shortages in the trades. We also have more people who want to work for us than we can reasonably hire. But housing is a tight market, despite an affordability crisis and a crisis of the unhoused. Labor costs money. Materials are expensive. And most people’s salaries have stagnated since the 1980s. Put the regular obstacles of job completion and skill and the damage that prompted repairs on top of there, and you have a very challenging market.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about Smaller Scale LLC?
Smaller Scale is an interior finishing service (think trim, drywall, paint, shelving, doors, tile, custom woodworking, etc.) that also does handyman tasks. Think small jobs that a larger firm won’t take on.
We hire people who are underrepresented in the trades and emphasize workforce development.
We serve people who might be uncomfortable inviting a more traditional provider into their home for repairs.
Where do you see things going in the next 5-10 years?
The trades are set to grow, if educational institutions and company training programs can keep up with demand. There’s a lot of political energy around affordable housing, and I look forward to the shift toward local, emerging developers rather than out-of-state firms who come in and gobble up resources without living in that community. I think a lot of municipalities are learning that local providers come with both greater accountability to the community they serve and can be more nimble and responsive than corporations or large development groups.
I think it’s great that more people than ever are interested in the trades, and the growing number of female contractors can illustrate that shift. What I see online, however, is quite a bit of know-your-place aggression with a small number of men who do not like that women are learning skills traditionally reserved for them. We need better education around the idea that integration of genders isn’t a threat. Diversity on teams strengthens them: there’s decades of research from organizational studies that proves this point.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://smallerscalelansing.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/smallerscalelansing/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/smallerscale
