Why Window Craft Is a Superior Trade — and What It Reveals About Skill, Leadership, and the Future of Craft
- Steve Quillian
- 3 days ago
- 6 min read
For as long as I’ve been in the trades, I’ve heard the same phrases repeated again and again.
“Good help is hard to find.”
“Clients don’t understand the work.”
“People won’t pay for quality.”
“The next generation doesn’t care.”
“The skills are disappearing.”
I heard it from my first boss as a teenage apprentice.
I’ve heard it from master carpenters.
I’ve heard it from furniture makers, millworkers, and restoration contractors.
I’ve heard it for more than thirty years.
For a long time, I accepted it.
But over time — through hiring, failing, training, building teams, and finally building a system — I came to a very different conclusion:
The problem is not that good help is hard to find. The problem is that most leaders never built a system capable of producing good help.
That may sound harsh.
But it is the most important leadership lesson I’ve learned in my entire career
The Ancient Myth of “Good Help Is Hard to Find”
That phrase is not modern.
It shows up in old trade books.
In guild complaints.
In 19th-century industrial writing.
In almost every generation.
Which tells us something important:
If every generation says the same thing,
then this cannot primarily be a generational problem.
It is a structural problem.
Other organizations scale just fine.
Armies scale.
Hospitals scale.
Airlines scale.
Factories scale.
Corporations scale.
They do not wait for culture to send them perfect people.
They manufacture competence.
In the trades, we rarely do.
We wait.
We complain.
We blame culture.
We blame clients.
We blame the next generation.
And we almost never ask the most dangerous question of all:
If I cannot produce skilled people, is the failure actually mine?
The Day I Learned I Couldn’t Teach People Who Thought They Already Knew
Early in my career, I hired a group of experienced tradesmen for a simple task.
They were supposed to reproduce a basic geometric cut:
Two opposing bevels — 10 degrees on one side, 15 on the other — down a long length of lumber.
Not complicated.
They ruined board after board.
I walked up, laid it out, made the cut in two minutes, and dismissed the entire group that day.
Not because they were lazy.
Not because they were unintelligent.
Because I realized something far more important:
I could not teach people who already believed they were masters.
Their problem was not lack of intelligence.
It was identity.
They had built a self-image of mastery that had never been subjected to real performance pressure.
And when identity is threatened, people do not learn.
They defend.
That day changed how I hired forever.
I stopped hiring claimed skill.
I started hiring teachability.
That is how I hired Israel in 2008.
And he has been with me ever since.
Why So Much Negativity Comes From Claimed Masters
Recently, I shared a post about the crisis in historic window work.
The comments followed a familiar pattern:
“People won’t pay.”
“Replacement has killed the trade.”
“Historic societies don’t care.”
“I’m about to abandon restoration.”
“Skilled labor is too expensive.”
It sounded like market analysis.
But when you look closely, something else appears.
These comments are not just economic.
They are identity narratives.
Many of these men built their careers in domains where:
Work is one-off
Quality is subjective
Time is unknowable
Difficulty is ambiguous
Failure is easy to excuse
In those environments, it is very easy to build:
Reputation
Image
Status
Identity
Without ever building reproducible mastery.
Then the market changes.
Replacement comes.
Prices tighten.
Clients compare.
Time matters.
And suddenly the question becomes unavoidable:
What can I actually produce, reliably, under pressure?
For many, the answer is painful.
So instead of adapting systems, they narrate decline.
“The world is broken.”
“The market is corrupt.”
“The culture no longer deserves quality.”
That preserves dignity.
But it forfeits agency.
The Custom Door That Proved My Point
This year I built a custom, one-of-a-kind door for a client.
Beautiful project.
Unique design.
No door like it.
And it exposed something critical.
Even with very high skill, I had:
No reliable way to estimate time
No reliable way to price it
No benchmark for difficulty
No standard for errors
No way to separate:
Learning time
Exploration time
Mistake time
Production time
At one point, I sat for hours hand-cutting tiny wooden plugs to decorate and fill patterns in the door.
High skill.
High judgment.
High craftsmanship.
And no idea if I was losing money.
That door taught me something fundamental:
One-off craft, no matter how skilled, cannot easily produce measurable mastery.
You can produce artists.
But you cannot build a system of mastery.
Why Window Craft Is Different — and Superior
Now contrast that with historic windows.
From roughly 1870 to 1940, almost every window in America shared the same anatomy:
A frame
One or two sash
Mechanics
Mortise and tenon joinery
Vertical motion
Predictable failure modes
Predictable protection requirements
This matters more than most people realize.
Because it means:
The tasks are finite
The sequences are known
The errors are classifiable
The time can be benchmarked
The output can be tested
Performance can be compared
A sash is a sash is a sash.
A frame is a frame is a frame.
Mechanics are mechanics.
Once you master the system, everything becomes variations on a theme.
This is exactly why:
Surgery can be taught
Aviation can be standardized
Machining can be certified
They operate on closed, repeatable technical systems.
Historic windows happen to be one of the very few architectural domains that share this property.
Window Craft as a Mirror
This is why Window Craft is not just a trade.
It is a mirror.
In Window Craft:
The window either works or it doesn’t
The sash either fits or it doesn’t
The time either meets standard or it doesn’t
The finish either protects or it doesn’t
There is nowhere to hide.
No reputation.
No stories.
No tools.
No years.
No image.
Only output.
Which is why Window Craft does something rare:
It exposes false mastery. And it accelerates real mastery.
It tells people the truth about:
What they can do
What they cannot do
How fast they are
How precise they are
How reliable they are
Impersonally.
And impersonality is mercy.
Because it allows people to discover:
I am not as skilled as I thought — but now I know exactly how to become skilled.
Why This Matters for New Entrants to the Trade
This is where the Window Craft Constitution matters.
People entering the trades today — especially those coming from outside traditional craft culture — are often damaged by the very environment I’ve been describing.
They are told:
The trade is dying
The skills are disappearing
The market is corrupt
The future is hopeless
And worse:
They are surrounded by people whose authority comes from:
Age
Gender
Stories
Tools
Image
Not from demonstrated mastery.
That is a dangerous environment for anyone trying to learn.
The Window Craft Constitution exists for one reason:
To replace personal authority with measured authority.
In this system:
Authority comes from performance
Rank comes from output
Status comes from mastery
Protection comes from structure
Not from personality.
That is how new entrants can be protected, stabilized, and lifted.
Not by encouragement.
By a ladder.
The Final Truth
Here is the conclusion I have come to after thirty years:
The crisis in the trades is not primarily economic.
It is not primarily cultural.
It is not primarily generational.
It is structural.
We never built systems capable of reproducing mastery.
And when mastery is not reproducible, three things always happen:
A few isolated masters exist
A large middle class of claimed skill emerges
Decline is blamed on the world instead of the system
Window Craft is different.
Because it operates in a rare domain where:
Mastery can be decomposed
Sequenced
Measured
Reproduced
Taught
And scaled
Not because windows are easy.
But because:
They are structured in a way that makes truth about skill unavoidable.
And in a world drowning in image, narrative, and claimed expertise…
A system that tells the truth about masteryis not just a training program.
It is a moral act.