Arkeem Sturgis is only 33 years old, but he speaks with the wisdom of someone who has lived many lives. In the middle of a recent interview, while changing his one-year-old daughter’s diaper, he interrupted the Fortune reporter’s question to offer a gentle correction:
“Breathe,” he said. “Take your time. You’ll get everything you need. You’re in no rush.”
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That instinct—to calm, to teach, to help others rise with him—became Sturgis’ trademark.
A father of six and founder of a heating and air conditioning and general services company in Jacksonville, Florida, he spent the last five years rebuilding himself from homelessness to his first $100,000 revenue year.
And he did it, he says, through faith, mentorship and the conviction that success in the crafts can still offer the kind of freedom that American millennials and Gen Z seek in other areas.
He also had to overcome what he considers unnecessary cultural barriers to the success of someone like him.
“We as a country have done a poor job of preparing our children for life,” he said. “We used to have woodworking classes in schools.” In his view, he had to struggle to get to this point in his career due to a lack of practical training in public education.
“We expect 18-year-olds to graduate from high school and make a permanent decision in their 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 his life.”
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The Sturgis fight wasn’t just emotional. In 2020, like many Americans during the pandemic, he was laid off from his job manufacturing jaw prosthetics at Zimmer-Biomet and his economic situation worsened. He became homeless, moving his wife and five children from hotel to hotel, Airbnbs and friends’ homes.
“It’s been a really, really, really hard year…keeping my family together and smiling through this whole process has been a lot,” Sturgis said.
He had never considered manual trades, but he had always been 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 program and later in the heating and cooling field.
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He started small, but went through mentoring and now has a business where he is his own boss and is on track to make $100,000 this year.
From homelessness to entrepreneurship
Sturgis started small at HBI, assembling furniture and fixing leaky faucets while working 10-hour night shifts in a warehouse.
“At one point, I was working 10 hours overnight, leaving at 7 a.m., getting into my business at 8 a.m., and working another 8 to 10 hours,” he said. “Then I would go to sleep and do it all over again.”
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Within months, he was gaining steady work through Home Depot’s Path to Pro program, a professional upskilling and referral program, and using the skills he learned at HBI to expand beyond general repairs.
The real turning point, however, came in 2024, when he returned to complete the HBI heating and cooling course and met his instructor, Steven “Papa Steve” Everitt.
“He literally bought me a pickup truck,” Sturgis recalled. “The truck cost $800… and he cared more about my success than the money he paid.”
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The mentorship, he said, changed his life. “He helped me change everything, from the way I looked — I cut my hair, I started dressing better. He took something away from me that I didn’t see in myself.”
That year, Sturgis won the HBI Chairman’s Award and an all-expenses-paid trip to Las Vegas. His business is now on track for its first year of $100,000 in revenue, a milestone that once seemed unimaginable.
Sturgis told Fortune that he is frustrated with the way the system fails to prepare people for the realities of the economy and fails to publicize the opportunities that exist 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 manual jobs shouldn’t be a stigma, he said, because it’s a place full of people with high IQs, they’re just using a different part of the brain than in an office job. “Some people,” he added, “want to work with their hands.”
Sturgis said he believes the U.S. could offer more job training and targeted incentives.
He also said he wants to see more grants and special credit for small businesses in crafts, funding that could help them grow, train apprentices and fill the hundreds of thousands of job openings left open each year.
“This is how we bridge the gap,” he said. “Giving people the tools to build something of their own.”
But too 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 stagnant job market rejects.
Others, he said, pursue “get rich quick” schemes: the softer versions through sports betting or ephemeral startup fads, and the darker ones through the illegal market.
“Our generation is 100% focused on building wealth,” Sturgis said. “Our generation likes good things.” He argued that you can still have these things with a life of manual labor.
General jobs — heating, cooling, plumbing, electrical — are “at the bottom of the pyramid” in how Gen Z thinks about wealth, Sturgis said.
However, the US faces a growing labor shortage in skilled labor, worsened by aggressive deportation efforts and a surge in demand due to the AI boom.
“Robots can’t build houses,” Sturgis said, aligning with comments from some of the Fortune 500’s top leaders.
For example, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has also said he believes we will soon need hundreds of thousands of electricians to operate 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 crafts as a path to independence — rather than an “old man” alternative — more people would seek them out.
When you explain to the younger generation that you can earn close to six figures in just a few years of general services work, it “piques their interest,” he explained.
“And they think, ‘Wait a minute. So you mean I can get my hands dirty and make all this 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. But if you can overcome your feelings and the difficulties, it gets easier. You look down the mountain and realize how far you’ve come.”
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