Arkeem Sturgis is only 33 years old, but he speaks with the wisdom of someone who has lived many lives. Midway through a recent interview, while changing his one-year-old daughter’s diaper, he stopped it. wealth the reporter’s question to offer a gentle correction: “Breathe,” he said. “Slow down. You’ll get what you need to do. Take your time.”
That instinct—to establish, to teach, to draw others along—became Sturgis’ hallmark. A father of six and founder of a handyman and HVAC business based in Jacksonville, Florida, he has spent the past five years rebuilding from homelessness to his first $100,000 year. And he did it, he says, through faith, mentorship and a belief that success in the trades can still provide the kind of freedom that millennials and Gen Z Americans are chasing elsewhere. He also had to overcome what he sees as unnecessary cultural barriers to success for someone like him.
“We as a country have done a poor job of equipping our children for life,” he said. “We used to have [wood]shopping in schools.” In his view, he had to struggle to get to this point in his career because of his lack of practical training in public education.
“We expect kids at age 18 to graduate from high school and make a permanent decision in our lives going to college,” he said. “An 18-year-old does not have the mental capacity to make a permanent decision for the rest of his life.”
Sturgis’ struggle wasn’t just an emotional one. In 2020, like many Americans during the pandemic, he was laid off from his job as a TMJ manufacturer at Zimmer Biomet, and his financial situation took a nosedive. He became homeless, shuttling his wife and five children between hotels, Airbnbs and friends’ houses.
“It’s been a really, really, really hard year … keeping my family together and smiling through the whole process has been a lot,” Sturgis said.
He had never minded trades, but he was always good with his hands. He found the Home Builders Institute (HBI), which offered a special program for children of veterans (his father served in the Navy), and enrolled in its carpentry and later HVAC program. It started small but led to mentorship and now a business where Sturgis is his own boss and on track to hit $100,000 in revenue this year.
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Sturgis started small at HBI, assembling furniture and fixing leaky faucets while working 10-hour night shifts at a warehouse. “At one point I was working 10 hours overnight, coming down at seven in the morning, working on my business at eight and working another eight to 10 hours,” he said. “Then you go to bed and I’ll do it again.”
Within months, he was earning a steady job through Home Depot’s Path to Pro program, a trade skills and job matching program and using the skills he learned at HBI to expand beyond personnel repairs.
The real turning point, however, came in 2024 when he returned to complete the HBI HVAC course and met his instructor, Steven “Papa Steve” Everitt. “He literally bought me a truck,” Sturgis recalled. “The truck was $800…and he cared more about me making it than the money he paid for that truck.”
The mentorship, he said, was life-changing. “It helped me change everything about the way I looked – I got a haircut, I started dressing better. It brought something out of me that I didn’t see in myself.”
That year, Sturgis won the HBI President’s Award and an all-expenses-paid trip to Las Vegas. His business is now on track for its first year of $100,000, a milestone that once seemed unimaginable.
says Sturgis wealth he’s frustrated with how the system fails to prepare people for the realities of the economy and doesn’t publicize the opportunities out there for workers like him.
“Not everyone is going to be a historian, not everyone is going to be a doctor, not everyone is going to be a lawyer,” he said. Working in the trades shouldn’t have a stigma, he said, because it’s full of high-IQ people, they’re just using a different part of their brain than a white-collar job. “Some people want to work with their hands,” he added.
Sturgis said he believes the U.S. could help address the shortage with more professional funding and targeted incentives. He also said he wants to see more grants and forgivable loans for small business owners in the trades, funding to help them grow, train apprentices and fill the hundreds of thousands of vacant jobs each year.
“That’s how we fill the void,” he said. “Giving people the tools to build something of their own.”
But many young people, he argued, are trapped in the belief that a four-year degree is the only path to success: taking on mountains of debt for credentials that a stuck job market spits out. Others, he said, pursue “get-rich-quick” schemes: the milder versions through sports betting or frothy startup fads, and the darker ones through the black market.
“Our generation is 100 percent focused on building wealth,” Sturgis said. “Our generation likes beautiful things.” He argued that you can still have these things through a life in the trades.
The trades — HVAC, plumbing, electrical work — sit “at the bottom of the totem pole” in how Gen Z thinks about wealth, Sturgis said. However, the US is facing a growing shortage of skilled labor, exacerbated by aggressive deportation efforts and an increase in demand due to the AI boom.
“Robots can’t build houses,” Sturgis said, aligning himself with comments from some of the top executives in the Fortune 500. For example, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang also said he thinks we’ll soon need hundreds of thousands of electricians to handle the explosive data center boom, while Ford CEO Jim Farley recently revealed his son had to ask last summer whether he needed to be put in doubt. faculty.
Sturgis said he believes that if schools could get Gen Z to see trades as a path to independence — rather than an “old man” solution — more would follow. When you explain to the younger generation that you can make close to six figures in just a few years working in the trades, “it piques their interest,” he explained.
“And they say, “Wait a minute. So you’re telling me I can get my hands dirty and make this much money?” Yes, you can,” Sturgis said.
“There was a lot of trial and error, a lot of long days, a lot of blood, sweat and tears,” he said. “But if you can push through your feelings and the valleys, it gets easier. You look back down the mountain and realize how far you’ve come.”
A version of this story was published on Fortune.com on October 12, 2025.
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com