STEER Partners commissioned a study with IncQuery and Emporia to learn where software fits in the blue-collar trades. Emporia sourced 50 verified trade operators across seven industries in less than a week.
Blue-collar businesses such as HVAC contractors, roofers, landscapers and waste haulers have been slower than most industries to adopt software. Many still run on whiteboards, spreadsheets and generic accounting tools, but that’s starting to change. Labor shortages, tighter regulations and rising customer expectations are pushing these operators toward software, which further accelerates the demand to consolidate platforms.
STEER Partners, a boutique strategy consulting firm serving private equity firms and their portfolio companies, wanted to uncover the true software opportunity within trade businesses. To do that, they commissioned a study in partnership with IncQuery and Emporia to uncover what operators use today, what’s missing and what they plan to purchase next. Findings were published in a fall 2026 report titled Blue-collar software insights: Market perspectives for private equity investors.
Emporia sourced the respondent pool, delivering 50 verified specialists in construction, HVAC, janitorial, waste, fleet, fire & life safety and manufacturing. Respondents represented a mix of:
The result was a sample weighted toward small and mid-sized, founder-led businesses, which is where software adoption has historically been slowest and where there’s the most opportunity to invest.
The survey found that demand for vertical specialization outpaces supply. 82% of operators say trade- or industry-specific software is important, while only 24% currently use an industry-specific vertical platform. The rest are working with broad multi-trade platforms, a patchwork of point solutions or manual processes that were never built for their workflow.
That gap is the reason investors care. The first wave of software investment in the trades went to broad platforms that handle common tasks like scheduling, dispatch and invoicing. The operators' answers point to the next wave: platforms built around the specific workflows of a single trade, with a path to becoming the system of record for the whole business. STEER's report also found that this kind of deeply embedded, trade-specific software is less exposed to near-term AI disruption, because it depends on context that general-purpose AI tools do not have.
"The respondents Emporia delivered were exactly who we needed: experienced operators running businesses in the trades. The team made the whole process easy, and the quality of the sample gave us confidence in the findings we put in front of our clients."
STEER Partners is a boutique consulting firm advising middle-market private equity sponsors, portfolio companies and corporate clients. Through targeted primary research, deep secondary analysis and proprietary data assets, they provide detailed market insights, commercial diligence assessments and actionable portfolio growth strategies to investors and their portfolio companies. STEER partnered with IncQuery, Caliper Lab and Emporia Research on the fall 2026 report.
IncQuery is how consulting and investment firms can finally be sure that their primary research is sound. Its tech-plus-expert model equips firms to do more in real time, verify in no time and collaborate at any time, so they can shorten the entire research cycle without cutting corners or compromising their objectives.
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