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, as he was changing the diaper of his one-year-old daughter, he stopped this Fortune reporter’s question to offer a gentle correction:
“Breathe,” he said. “Slow down. You’re gonna get everything that you need to get done. You’re not in a rush.”
That instinct—to steady, to teach, to pull others up with him—has become Sturgis’ hallmark. A father of six and founder of a Jacksonville, Florida-based handyman and HVAC business, he’s spent the past five years rebuilding from homelessness to his first $100,000 year. And he’s done it, he says, through faith, mentorship, and the conviction that success in the trades can still offer the kind of freedom millennials and Gen Z Americans are chasing elsewhere. He’s 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 equipping our children for life,” he said. “We used to have [wood]shop in schools.” In his view, he had to struggle to reach this point in his career because of a lack of hands-on training in public education.
“We expect children at the age of 18 to graduate high school and make a permanent decision in our lives by going to college,” he said. “An 18-year-old does not have the mental capacity to make a permanent decision for the rest of their lives.”
Sturgis’ struggle was not just an emotional one. In 2020, like many Americans during the pandemic, he was laid off from his job as a TMJ fabricator at Zimmer-Biomet and his economic situation spiraled. He became homeless, shuttling his wife and five children between hotels, Airbnbs, and friends’ homes.
“It was a really, really, really rough year … keeping my family together and smiling through that entire process was a lot,” Sturgis said.
He had never considered the trades, but he was always good at his hands. He found the Home Builders Institute (HBI), which provided a special program for children of veterans (his father served in the Navy) and enrolled in its carpentry program and later in HVAC. It started small but led to mentorship and now a business where Sturgis is his own boss and on track to make $100,000 in revenue this year.
From homelessness to entrepreneurship
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, getting off at seven in the morning, clocking into my business at eight o’clock, and working another eight to 10 hours,” he said. “Then going to sleep and doing it again.”
Within months, he was earning steady work through Home Depot’s Path to Pro program, a trades skills and job matching program, and using the skills he learned at HBI to expand beyond handyman repairs.
The real turning point, however, came in 2024, when he returned to complete HBI’s 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 succeeding than he cared about the money he paid for that truck.”
The mentorship, he said, was life-changing. “He helped me change everything from the way I looked—I cut my hair, I started dressing better. He pulled something out of me that I didn’t see in myself.”
That year, Sturgis won HBI’s Chairman’s Award and an all-expenses-paid trip to Las Vegas. His business is now on track for its first $100,000 year, a milestone that once felt unimaginable.
Sturgis tells Fortune that he’s frustrated by how the system fails to prepare people for the realities of the economy, and doesn’t advertise the opportunities out there for workers like him. “Everybody’s not going to be a historian, everybody’s not going to be a doctor, everybody’s not going to be a lawyer,” he said. Working in the trades shouldn’t have a stigma, he said, because it’s full of people with high IQs, they’re just using a different part of their brain than a white-collar job. “Some people,” he added, “want to work with their hands.”
Sturgis said he believes the U.S. could help fix the shortage with more vocational funding and targeted incentives. He also said he wants to see more grants and forgivable loans for small-business owners in the trades, funding that could help them scale, train apprentices, and fill the hundreds of thousands of open jobs left vacant each year.
”That’s how we fill the gap,” he said. “By 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 stalled labor market spits out. Others, he said, chase “get-rich-quick” schemes: the softer versions through sports betting or frothy startup fads, and the darker ones through the black market.
“Our generation is 100% focused on wealth building,” Sturgis said. “Our generation likes nice 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. Yet, 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 boom.
“Robots can’t build houses,” Sturgis said, aligning with comments from some of the top leaders in the Fortune 500. For instance, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has also said he believes we’ll soon need hundreds of thousands of electricians to man the explosive data center boom, while Ford CEO Jim Farley recently revealed that his son worked as a mechanic last summer and is openly questioning whether he needs to go to college.
Sturgis said he believes that if schools could empower Gen Z to see the trades as a path to independence—rather than a fallback for “old men”—more would pursue it. When you explain to the younger generation that one can make close to six figures in just a few years of work in the trades, it “piques their interest,” he explained.
“And they’re like, ‘Wait a minute. So you mean to tell me, I can get my hands dirty and I can make that much money?’ Yes, you can,” Sturgis said.
“It’s been a lot of trial and error, a lot of long days, a lot of blood, sweat, and tears,” he said. “But if you can manage to push past your feelings and the valleys, it gets easier. You look back down the mountain and realize how far you’ve come.”
Politics8 years ago