Starting or buying a welding business can be a profitable opportunity, but success comes down to more than skilled labor.
In this episode of JackQuisitions, Jack Carr breaks down how to start, buy, and scale a welding company from a $50K mobile operation to a 5M–10M industrial services business.
Jack explores the economics of mobile welding, fabrication, emergency repairs, and industrial contracts. He also covers startup costs, labor utilization, hiring skilled welders, and the biggest mistakes that can destroy profitability.
Plus, Jack explains why he'd rather buy an established welding company than start from scratch, and what makes a welding business worth acquiring.
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IN THIS EPISODE
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• Why welding businesses can be a strong industrial services investment
• How to start a mobile welding business for around $50K
• The most profitable welding services and emergency repair jobs
• Mobile welding vs. fabrication shops vs. industrial welding
• How welding companies make money through skilled labor staffing
• Scaling a welding business from $1M to $5M and $10M
• Why labor utilization can make or break a welding company
• The hidden risks of bad estimating, payroll, and material costs
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SPONSORS
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First Internet Bank
Looking to buy or grow a home service business? First Internet Bank offers SBA financing for acquisitions, partner buyouts, and commercial real estate. Mention Owned and Operated for a reduced good faith deposit, a free deal review, and buyside prequalification: https://alanfib.com/
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Welding is one of those businesses that looks incredibly simple from the outside. Buy a welder, hire a few guys, get a shop and start sticking metal together. But the deeper you get into it, the more you realize that a welding company is about six different things. You might have crews going into manufacturing plants for shutdown work. You might even rent welders out by the hour to contractors who just need more bodies. That's what makes this business so interesting because welding itself is not really the product. The product is either fabrication, skilled labor, or expensive problem solving. And depending on which one you sell, the economics look extremely different. Let's start with why
I like this business. There is an absurd amount of steel in our economy. And when I say steel, I mean all metal. So demand is never the problem. The question is what kind of demand do you want? Because there's massive differences between a contractor sending you a drawing for 200 feet of handrails and asking you for a bid, and a quarry calling in because a piece of equipment just cracked and all of production is stopped. The first customer is price shopping, they're getting the best costs possible. And the second customer is buying speed. And that difference matters because emergency service is always going to be better margins. Personally, I want as much as the urgency business as possible. Mobile and shop work are not competing business models, they feed each other. The fabrication team can build platforms, stairs, guardrails, while the field team is installing from another crew. And when the customer needs three extra certified welders for six weeks, you can send labor directly into their facilities. And that creates a much more interesting company than just we have a welding shop and we build handrails.
What does it take to start all this though? If I were already a welder, I would start extremely lean. You could probably build a respectable mobile setup for about $50,000 depending on the truck. If my goal is I want to actually buy a company and not recreate myself a job, I'd probably want to move closer to $100,000 to $150,000 because I would want working capital. You have to buy steel up front, and steel is not cheap. So I want some room to take on jobs without immediately running out of cash. And then I'll worry about the shop that comes later on, depending on the market and how expenses, real estate, et cetera, et cetera. But I would start by keeping it
modest. Now, how does this thing actually make money? Mobile repair. You're going out and you're working for other B2B contractors, fixing trailers and equipment and dumpsters. These tickets might only start out to be $500 to $1,500 jobs, but the margins are great because the material is usually the smallest part of the job. Number two, fabrication, handrails, stairs, platforms, equipment guards. And this is where the shop starts to earn its keep. Third, field installation and project work. You fabricate something in the shop, you send the crew out to install it. You now just captured both sides of the manufacturing and the field labor. And then fourth is labor. This is the part where most people overlook because a contractor, a factory, an industrial facility may need five welders right now. So now your welding company can be effectively become a specialized staffing company. And maybe you pay your welders, you know, $40 an hour, but you can build them out at $60 or $70 an hour. Your inventory is skilled labor. The key word here is utilization because this is where welding companies get absolutely killed. You have 20 welders and 18 of them are billing customers. That's a great business. But if you have 20 welders and only six of them are working and the other 14 are sitting at the shop waiting for work, you have a payroll problem. And that's why you need to track labor utilization obsessively. Here, how much labor is sitting on the bench? Those metrics are gonna end up mattering more than probably almost anything else in the company.
If you're buying a business, buying out a business partner, or buying some commercial real estate in 2026, Alan Peterson is someone you want on your side. He spent over the last decade structuring deals nationwide and is one of the best in the industry. And he is because he's hands-on, he works with owners and operators and new buyers from start to finish, and that's his specialty. And with the SBA 7A loan, you can finance up to 90% of a deal, access flexible collateral options, and even secure long-term loans 25 years on real estate. Click the link in the description below and get a reduced good faith deposit as well as a complimentary deal review and the buyer pre-qualification with Alan Peterson at first internet bank or head on over to Alan Fib.com. That's a L-A-N-F-I B.com. Getting to your first million, it's not complicated, but going from 1 million to 5 million is when it starts to get hard because the owner is no longer the guy doing all the estimating and is also the lead welder. You need to have somebody going out to jobs and managing them, right? You're sending out field labor, you need to have someone managing that. A foreman or shop manager who can solve those technical problems without calling the owner is going to be the key at around that five million mark. And at that five million to ten million dollar mark, the business starts looking like a real industrial services company, which is when it gets fun. At that five to ten million mark, there's a ton more risk. And it's important to understand these risks because it's not just about welding quality
alone anymore, it's about keeping the machine fed. And there's a lot of risk in keeping that machine fed. If revenue disappears, you still have payroll. It's fixed payroll, you start letting off people. And if you don't, that's even worse because your business just collapses. The other risk here is bad estimating. Like I said before, you need somebody who's very, very good at estimating out projects because fabrication is full of jobs that look great on paper but can turn into complete disasters. You bid for 300 hours and all of a sudden it takes 500 hours. You bid for something that's six months in advance, steel prices go up. The drawings change, the customer wants to modify things, and then you have to wait after all that is said and done, sometimes 30, 60, 90 days to get paid, and you wait all that upfront cost. This is how you can do 5 million in revenue and wonder where all your money went. If I were to buy a welding company here in the near future, here's what I would want customer diversity, as much as possible. I would rather have 50 recurring commercial accounts than three giant ones. Second, I want a mix of work. I want some fabrication, I want some mobile service, maybe even some field installation and labor rental, because that makes the business more resilient if one shuts down. And then third, I want leadership beyond the owner. The owner, if he's the only estimator and the best welder, and the person everybody knows and calls, and the person going out to sell these jobs, then that's a talented guy with employees. And once I lose that talented guy, I'm just stuck with the employees and no business. If I had the money, had $100,000, and I could buy or start a welding company today, I would probably buy rather than start. And not because welding is super expensive to start, it's not. We just went over that. I would buy because I think the value is in the customer relationships and the workforce. That's where the really difficult portions are. And finding 10 solid welders and 20 recurring contracts and customers can take years and years and years. Buying them can compress that time dramatically. So would I own one? Yes, 100%. But I would not buy a welding company thinking that just because welding is cool, I would buy a welding company because it sits at a really interesting transition in tailwinds today, where manufacturing and construction and transportation and industrial are all crossing. And I would build it around one key thing is keeping skilled welders busy and solving expensive problems. Because sometimes that means fabricating in the shop, sometimes that means fabricating in the field, fixing things in the field, and sometimes that means sending six guys out for a few weeks to go work on a startup project. Welding's just the capability. The real business here is monetizing that skilled labor in a way that the guy down the street doesn't. And that's the version of this business that I want. If you like what you heard, if you agree, if you disagree, if you say, Jack, you can't dig well for crap, leave it in the comments below. I probably won't read that last part, but anything else I will. And I'll see you on the next one.
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