What ‘low status’ job actually made you wealthy?

The War of Attrition

For 4 years, I grounded out. Got my journeyman license, then my masters. Learned every code requirement. I started to notice patterns. Emergency calls were paying $500 an hour.

Commercial contracts were going begging because there weren’t enough qualified plumbers. The old guys were retiring and nobody was replacing them. While my cousins were competing with 10,000 other kids for entry-level positions, I was getting calls from desperate property managers.

One emergency weekend call to a restaurant paid more than my cousins made in a month. So, I made my move. I bought out Tony’s client list when he retired.

I paid a fair price that let him and his wife move to Florida comfortably, not pennies on the dollar like some vultures do. The whole family thought I was insane taking on that kind of debt at 23.

My cousin Brad, the gym membership comedian, actually laughed out loud when I told him at my sister Amy’s birthday dinner. He said: “You’re going to owe money until you’re 50 for a bunch of phone numbers”.

He was three beers in and getting louder. Meanwhile, I just got promoted to senior developer. Stock options, baby.

I started hitting Tony’s client list hard. Every morning, I’d call five customers, introduce myself, offer a free inspection. Most were relieved to hear Tony had a successor they could trust.

Within 2 months, I had steady commercial contracts with three apartment complexes and a strip mall. The property managers were desperate for someone reliable who actually showed up when promised. My phone rang constantly.

I hired my first employee, a kid named Marcus, who reminded me of myself: eager, but clueless. Teaching him felt like paying forward what Tony taught me. Brad lost his job 3 months later. The startup ran out of funding.

He didn’t tell anyone for weeks. He just kept showing up to family dinners in his company hoodie, talking about pivoting and new opportunities.

I only found out because I ran into him at Home Depot at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday, studying the plumbing aisle. He tried to play it off like he was fixing something at home, but I saw the plumbing code book in his cart.

“Just curious about what you do,” he said, not meeting my eyes.

The sabotage started small. One morning, I showed up to find my van’s tires deflated. Not slashed, just deflated. Annoying, but not destructive.

Then my business card started disappearing from the local hardware stores where I’d left them. The store owner said someone had been taking whole stacks. I figured it was just bad luck until the state inspector showed up at three of my job sites in one week.

It was the same inspector each time. He was asking about permits I definitely had, looking for violations that didn’t exist. The third time he let slip that someone had called in anonymous complaints about unsafe practices.

My insurance company called the next week. My premium was tripling. When I asked why, they mentioned recent safety concerns brought to their attention. There were no specifics, just vague mentions of industry reports.

I started checking online review sites and found new one-star reviews with photos of my work truck parked slightly crooked. Captions were about reckless contractors who don’t follow basic safety. The usernames were random letters and numbers, all created within days of each other.

Marcus came to me nervous one morning. “Hey boss, weird thing. Got a call last night. Some guy saying you’re operating without proper insurance that I could get in legal trouble working for you”.

My other new hire, Devon, had gotten the same call. They’d both hung up, but it rattled them. Devon’s wife was pregnant. He couldn’t afford any legal problems.

I showed them my insurance documents, my licenses, everything. They stayed, but I could see the doubt creeping in. Then things escalated. I started noticing Brad’s car near my job sites.

It wasn’t every time, but enough to form a pattern. He’d park down the street, pretend to be on his phone. I mentioned it to my sister Amy at Sunday dinner, trying to keep it casual.

She rolled her eyes. “He’s probably just bored. You know how he gets without a job,” but our mom pulled me aside later. “Brad’s mother has been saying things at church about how you’re running some kind of scam, that Tony didn’t properly transfer the business”.

I showed her the paperwork, the bill of sale, everything legitimate and notorized. She believed me, but the damage was spreading. My permit applications started hitting mysterious delays. Jobs that should have been approved in days stretched to weeks.

The permit office kept finding clerical errors that required resubmission. I recognized the clerk who kept rejecting them. A young woman who’d started bringing Brad coffee when I was waiting in line.

They’d chat and laugh while I stood there with my corrected forms. One time, I heard her say: “Your cousin’s here again.”

And they both smirked.

The copper theft changed everything. I’d installed security cameras after small tools started disappearing from job sites. Just basic stuff at first, channel locks, pipe cutters. I figured it was opportunistic theft, maybe local kids.

But then I lost $500 worth of copper pipes from a renovation site. The cameras caught everything. Brad’s car pulling up at 2:00 a.m. Brad in a baseball cap loading pipes into his trunk.

It was clear as day, license plate visible. I sat on that footage for a week, unsure what to do. Family is family, even when they’re trying to destroy your business.

But then the fake reviews got worse. Customers claimed I’d flooded their basements, cracked their foundations, overcharged by thousands. Each review had just enough detail to sound plausible, but was completely fabricated.

Three real clients called to cancel contracts. “We just can’t take the risk,” one said. “We’ve been reading things”.

The apprentice situation was the final straw. Marcus told me Brad had approached him at a gas station, offered him double wages to jump ship and bring client contacts. He said he’s starting his own company, that yours is going under anyway.

Marcus recorded part of the conversation on his phone. Brad’s voice was clear. “Just get me the client list and the supplier accounts. He’ll never prove anything”.

I started building my case methodically. I downloaded all the fake reviews, documenting their creation dates and patterns. I kept logs of every delayed permit, every suspicious inspection.

Amy helped more than she let on, forwarding me emails where Brad had tried to recruit her husband. One read: “Tell them what you know about your brother’s business. We could make this all go away if you cooperate”.

She was furious. “I stayed neutral as long as I could, but this is too much”.

My dad found Tony’s original documents in his filing system. Every transfer form was perfectly legitimate. He’d kept copies of everything from his 20 years of doing Tony’s books.

“I knew something like this might happen,” he said. “People get desperate when they see someone younger succeeding”.

He also found something interesting. Brad had been researching plumbing businesses for sale, making lowball offers that got rejected. He wanted what I had, but didn’t want to work for it.

The family reunion was in 3 weeks. Brad had been telling everyone he had big news to announce. I had a feeling I knew what it was.

My supplier confirmed my suspicions when he called. He said: “Your cousin was just here asking about setting up a commercial account. said he’s launching next month. Already has several contracts lined up”.

The contracts he mentioned sounded suspiciously like my clients. I spent those three weeks preparing. Had my lawyer draft cease and desist letters for the fake reviews. I filed a police report for the copper theft with the security footage.

I documented every single act of sabotage with dates, times, and evidence. But I also kept working. I landed two new commercial contracts. I hired another apprentice, my cousin Lisa, who’d been working retail and hating it.

She’d supported me from day one. She never made jokes. She always asked how the business was growing. The morning of the reunion, three of the clients Brad thought he’d stolen signed new contracts with me.

They’d been playing along on my request, letting him think he’d poached them. “We wanted to see how far he’d go,” one property manager told me. “Pretty sick what he’s been doing to you”.

They’d recorded their conversations with him. He’d explicitly claimed to be taking over my contracts through better service and proper insurance.

At the reunion, Brad stood up during dinner with a champagne glass. He started his announcement about his new plumbing company. He talked about how he’d already secured major contracts, how sometimes the student becomes the master.

That’s when I stood up, too. I pulled out my phone and played the security footage on the TV. The room went silent, watching Brad steal copper pipes at 2 a.m.

His permit office girlfriend dumped him by text before dessert was served. The fake reviews got traced back to his IP address after the police got involved. His business license application was denied for fraud.

Brad’s now working at a hardware store, still paying off the lawyer who couldn’t keep him from getting charged with theft. He asked me for a job last month. He said he’d work for apprentice wages, that he’d learned his lesson.

I told him I’d already hired Lisa, who was turning out to be naturally gifted with pipe fitting. She’d never tried to sabotage anyone, never stolen anything, never made fake reviews. Funny how that works out.

My business is booming. Turns out when you focus on actually doing good work instead of tearing others down, customers notice. Who would have thought?

The hardware store manager called me 2 weeks after the reunion. He said: “Your cousin’s been asking a lot of questions about commercial accounts again. Thought you should know”.

I thanked him and hung up, wondering when Brad would finally give up. The theft charges had stuck. He received community service and restitution.

Nothing that would land him in jail, but enough to tank any chance at a contractor’s license for years. Yet here he was, still circling my business like a shark that couldn’t admit the ocean had moved on.

Lisa was working out better than I’d hoped. She had steady hands and actually listened when I explained why we did things certain ways. Marcus had started training her on the basics while I handled the commercial jobs.

Devon’s wife had their baby, and I gave him two weeks paid leave, even though we were swamped. That’s when I noticed my suppliers delivery truck driving past our job site without stopping.

The driver called me an hour later, confused. “Someone called and canceled your order. Said you were switching suppliers”.

I hadn’t cancelled anything. The order was for a restaurant renovation starting Monday. That was $3,000 worth of materials I needed on site.

I called the suppliers’s office and they played me the voicemail. The voice was muffled, but the call back number was Brad’s old work cell. He’d kept it active.

Apparently, I had to drive 2 hours to another supplier to get the materials. I ended up paying rush fees that into my profit margin. Lisa helped me load everything while Marcus handled our regular service calls.

“Why would someone do that?” She asked, genuinely puzzled.

I explained Brad’s history while we drove back. Her face darkened. “He’s the one who told my mom you’d probably go under within a year. said, ‘I was making a mistake working for you'”.

That was news to me, but not surprising. The next morning, I found Marcus at a job site looking frustrated. The property manager had called him directly, saying I’d sent a message about Marcus taking over the contract.

“She showed me the email,” Marcus said. “Had your company logo and everything”.

The email address was one letter off from mine. It was easy to miss if you weren’t looking carefully. The message praised Marcus’ work and suggested he was ready to handle accounts independently. This implied I was planning to let him go.

I spent an hour on the phone with the property manager, explaining the situation. She believed me eventually, but the seed of doubt was there.

“Maybe you should look into better email security,” she suggested. This was as if I hadn’t already changed passwords and enabled two-factor authentication on everything.

But Brad wasn’t hacking accounts. He was creating fake ones, exploiting the trust I’d built with clients. Devon came back from leave to find his van’s registration had expired, except it hadn’t. Someone had reported it stolen, then canceled the report, but not before the DMV flagged it.