Carlos Rodriguez
Carlos Rodriguez

The U.S. construction industry needs to add roughly 349,000 net new workers this year just to keep pace with demand, according to a workforce model from Associated Builders and Contractors. A separate survey by the Associated General Contractors of America and the National Center for Construction Education and Research found that 92 percent of contractors are struggling to fill open positions.

Carlos Rodriguez has spent years building a business around that shortage.

Rodriguez founded CR Pro Staffing and developed the company from a North Carolina operation built through direct contractor relationships into a multistate skilled-trades staffing business now based in Florida.

The company places electricians, plumbers, ironworkers, welders, and pipefitters with contractors and facilities across several U.S. states. According to a financial analysis of the company's tax filings, CR Pro Staffing's total income grew from approximately $4.4 million in 2020 to more than $32.5 million in 2025, an increase of approximately 634 percent over six years. Rodriguez says the company now places roughly 2,000 workers annually.

Building a Business Around Skilled Labor

Rodriguez immigrated to the United States from Honduras before founding CR Pro Staffing. He describes the company's early years as a hands-on operation built through phone calls, paperwork, and direct relationships with contractors.

In the beginning, Rodriguez personally worked to establish the company's reputation, showing up at job sites and demonstrating to contractors that the skilled labor his company supplied could be relied upon.

For Rodriguez, those early relationships became the foundation for expansion beyond a single market.

"I came here with nothing but the idea that hard work still means something," Rodriguez said. "Every person we place on a job site is proof of that."

As the company grew, Rodriguez focused CR Pro Staffing on skilled trades rather than general labor, positioning the business around workers whose experience and certifications were increasingly difficult for contractors to find.

Electricians and welders are currently among the trades most in demand among CR Pro Staffing's clients, according to Rodriguez, and industry surveys have repeatedly identified both positions among the hardest for contractors to fill.

Rather than competing primarily on the volume of workers it could provide, Rodriguez said the company concentrated on finding experienced tradespeople capable of meeting the requirements of more specialized projects.

From Construction Sites to Complex Facilities

That specialization helped CR Pro Staffing expand into increasingly demanding environments.

The company's project history has included pharmaceutical, distribution, and healthcare operations in addition to construction work. Rodriguez said CR Pro Staffing has supplied labor for pharmaceutical operations tied to Corning, deploying more than 100 workers on that account over the years.

The company has also provided staffing for distribution operations run by Amazon, Target, and Walmart, as well as hospital systems including Duke University Hospital and UNC Hospitals.

Each environment presents different workforce requirements.

A worker suited for one project may need different certifications, experience, or credentials for another. As the company's client base expanded, Rodriguez said growth became less about simply finding additional workers and more about making sure the right qualified tradespeople could be deployed to the right projects.

That required CR Pro Staffing to become increasingly structured in how it verified and tracked worker qualifications.

The approach allowed the company to move from conventional commercial construction assignments into regulated pharmaceutical sites, manufacturing environments, and other specialized facilities without abandoning its core focus on skilled trades.

Growing Beyond a Single Market

CR Pro Staffing's expansion also required Rodriguez to take a business initially built through personal contractor relationships and develop an operation capable of working across multiple states.

That transition changed the nature of the company.

A staffing business operating in one market can depend heavily on local relationships and the founder's personal knowledge of workers and contractors. Operating across several states requires those relationships to be supported by systems capable of tracking workers, certifications, assignments, and client requirements across different projects simultaneously.

For Rodriguez, building that infrastructure became increasingly important as CR Pro Staffing's revenue and workforce activity grew.

The company's increase from approximately $4.4 million in total income in 2020 to more than $32.5 million in 2025 reflects the scale of that expansion. But Rodriguez says growth also created a new challenge: maintaining access to enough qualified tradespeople to keep serving an expanding client base.

A Labor Shortage That Isn't Going Away

The shortage that helped create an opportunity for companies such as CR Pro Staffing remains one of construction's most persistent problems.

Roughly a quarter of the U.S. construction workforce is foreign-born, according to AGC, leaving the industry particularly sensitive to changes affecting the availability of workers. Contractors surveyed by AGC heading into 2026 also identified rising wages, project delays, and difficulty retaining workers among their major concerns.

At the same time, large-scale infrastructure and data-center development are increasing competition for many of the same skilled tradespeople traditional contractors already struggle to hire.

Rodriguez expects that competition to keep demand for skilled-labor staffing elevated.

For CR Pro Staffing, however, continued demand creates its own pressure. As the company expands, Rodriguez says the challenge is increasingly not finding contractors who need workers but maintaining a sufficiently large pool of qualified tradespeople to serve them.

What Comes After Rapid Growth

What began with Rodriguez personally calling contractors and proving the reliability of the workers he supplied has developed into a multistate staffing operation placing roughly 2,000 workers annually.

The company's growth has also taken it into increasingly complex industries and projects, where worker qualifications, certifications, and reliability can be as important as simply filling an open position.

For Rodriguez, the labor shortage that created an opportunity for CR Pro Staffing has therefore become one of the biggest constraints on its continued expansion.

The next stage of the company's development, he says, will depend on its ability to continue identifying qualified skilled tradespeople while maintaining the standards that allowed the business to expand beyond its original North Carolina market.

The opportunity for growth remains substantial. So does the difficulty of supplying the workers necessary to capture it.

For a company that grew from approximately $4.4 million in total income in 2020 to more than $32.5 million in 2025, Rodriguez's next challenge is no longer proving that contractors need skilled labor.

It is building an organization capable of continuing to deliver it at scale.