Arkeem Sturgis is just 33 years outdated, however he speaks with the knowledge of somebody who has lived many lives. Halfway via a latest interview, as he was altering the diaper of his one-year-old daughter, he stopped this Fortune reporter’s query to supply a delicate correction:
“Breathe,” he mentioned. “Decelerate. You’re gonna get the whole lot that you could get finished. You’re not in a rush.”
That intuition—to regular, to show, to drag others up with him—has turn out to be Sturgis’ hallmark. A father of six and founding father of a Jacksonville, Florida-based handyman and HVAC enterprise, he’s spent the previous 5 years rebuilding from homelessness to his first $100,000 12 months. And he’s finished it, he says, via religion, mentorship, and the conviction that success within the trades can nonetheless provide the sort of freedom millennials and Gen Z Individuals are chasing elsewhere. He’s additionally needed to overcome what he sees as pointless cultural limitations to success for somebody like him.
“We as a rustic have finished a poor job equipping our youngsters for all times,” he mentioned. “We used to have [wood]store in faculties.” In his view, he needed to battle to succeed in this level in his profession due to an absence of hands-on coaching in public schooling.
“We count on youngsters on the age of 18 to graduate highschool and make a everlasting resolution in our lives by going to varsity,” he mentioned. “An 18-year-old doesn’t have the psychological capability to make a everlasting resolution for the remainder of their lives.”
Sturgis’ battle was not simply an emotional one. In 2020, like many Individuals throughout the pandemic, he was laid off from his job as a TMJ fabricator at Zimmer-Biomet and his financial scenario spiraled. He turned homeless, shuttling his spouse and 5 youngsters between resorts, Airbnbs, and buddies’ properties.
“It was a very, actually, actually tough 12 months … maintaining my household collectively and smiling via that complete course of was quite a bit,” Sturgis mentioned.
He had by no means thought of the trades, however he was at all times good at his fingers. He discovered the Home Builders Institute (HBI), which supplied a particular program for youngsters of veterans (his father served within the Navy) and enrolled in its carpentry program and later in HVAC. It began small however led to mentorship and now a enterprise the place Sturgis is his personal boss and on monitor to make $100,000 in income this 12 months.
From homelessness to entrepreneurship
Sturgis began small at HBI, assembling furnishings and fixing leaky taps, whereas working 10-hour night time shifts at a warehouse. “At one level I used to be working 10 hours in a single day, getting off at seven within the morning, clocking into my enterprise at eight o’clock, and dealing one other eight to 10 hours,” he mentioned. “Then going to sleep and doing it once more.”
Inside months, he was incomes regular work via Home Depot’s Path to Pro program, a trades abilities and job matching program, and utilizing the talents he realized at HBI to develop past handyman repairs.
The true turning level, nevertheless, got here in 2024, when he returned to finish HBI’s HVAC course and met his teacher, Steven “Papa Steve” Everitt. “He actually purchased me a truck,” Sturgis recalled. “The truck was $800 … and he cared extra about me succeeding than he cared concerning the cash he paid for that truck.”
The mentorship, he mentioned, was life-changing. “He helped me change the whole lot from the best way I regarded—I minimize my hair, I began dressing higher. He pulled one thing out of me that I didn’t see in myself.”
That 12 months, Sturgis received HBI’s Chairman’s Award and an all-expenses-paid journey to Las Vegas. His enterprise is now on monitor for its first $100,000 12 months, a milestone that when felt unimaginable.
Sturgis tells Fortune that he’s pissed off by how the system fails to arrange individuals for the realities of the economic system, and doesn’t promote the alternatives on the market for employees like him. “Everyone’s not going to be a historian, everyone’s not going to be a physician, everyone’s not going to be a lawyer,” he mentioned. Working within the trades shouldn’t have a stigma, he mentioned, as a result of it’s full of individuals with excessive IQs, they’re simply utilizing a special a part of their mind than a white-collar job. “Some individuals,” he added, “wish to work with their fingers.”
Sturgis mentioned he believes the U.S. might assist repair the scarcity with extra vocational funding and focused incentives. He additionally mentioned he desires to see extra grants and forgivable loans for small-business house owners within the trades, funding that might assist them scale, practice apprentices, and fill the tons of of 1000’s of open jobs left vacant every year.
”That’s how we fill the hole,” he mentioned. “By giving individuals the instruments to construct one thing of their very own.”
However many younger individuals, he argued, are trapped within the perception {that a} four-year diploma is the one path to success: taking over mountains of debt for credentials that a stalled labor market spits out. Others, he mentioned, chase “get-rich-quick” schemes: the softer variations via sports activities betting or frothy startup fads, and the darker ones via the black market.
“Our era is 100% targeted on wealth constructing,” Sturgis mentioned. “Our era likes good issues.” He argued which you could nonetheless have these items via a life within the trades.
The trades—HVAC, plumbing, electrical work—sit “on the backside of the totem pole” in how Gen Z thinks about wealth, Sturgis mentioned. But, the U.S. faces a deepening labor shortage in skilled work, made worse by aggressive deportation efforts and a surge in demand from the AI growth.
“Robots can’t construct homes,” Sturgis mentioned, aligning with feedback from among the prime leaders within the Fortune 500. As an example, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has additionally said he believes we’ll quickly want tons of of 1000’s of electricians to man the explosive knowledge heart growth, whereas Ford CEO Jim Farley recently revealed that his son labored as a mechanic final summer time and is brazenly questioning whether or not he must go to varsity.
Sturgis mentioned he believes that if faculties might empower Gen Z to see the trades as a path to independence—quite than a fallback for “outdated males”—extra would pursue it. Whenever you clarify to the youthful era that one could make shut to 6 figures in just some years of labor within the trades, it “piques their curiosity,” he defined.
“They usually’re like, ‘Wait a minute. So that you imply to inform me, I can get my fingers soiled and I could make that a lot cash?’ Sure, you may,” Sturgis mentioned.
“It’s been loads of trial and error, loads of lengthy days, loads of blood, sweat, and tears,” he mentioned. “However if you happen to can handle to push previous your emotions and the valleys, it will get simpler. You look again down the mountain and notice how far you’ve come.”
