A millennial father of six turned homelessness into a six-figure business — a blueprint for America’s reskilling revolution

That instinct — consistency, teaching and drawing others with him — has become Sturgis’s hallmark. A father of six and founder of an HVAC company based in Jacksonville, Florida, he has spent the past five years rebuilding from homelessness to making his first $100,000 in his first year. He says he did this through faith, mentorship and the conviction that success in the professions can still offer the kind of freedom that millennials and Gen Z Americans seek elsewhere. He also had to overcome what he saw as 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 had a (wood) shop in the schools.” IFrom his perspective, he had to struggle to get to this point in his career due to the lack of hands-on training in public education.

“We expect 18-year-olds to graduate from high school and make a permanent decision in our lives to go 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’s struggle wasn’t just emotional. In 2020, like many Americans during the pandemic, he was laid off from his job as a TMJ manufacturer at Zimmer-Biomet and his economic situation deteriorated. He became homeless, moving with his wife and five children between hotels, Airbnbs and friends’ homes.

“It’s been a really, really tough year, keeping my family together and smiling through this whole process has been tough,” Sturgis said.

He had never thought of such occupations, but he had always been skilled with his hands. Found 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 HVAC. It started small but led to mentorship, and is now a business where Sturges is his own boss and is on track to do $100,000 in revenue this year.

From homelessness to entrepreneurship

Sturgis started out 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-hour days all night, leaving at 7 a.m., recording my work at 8 p.m., and working another eight to 10 hours,” he said. “Then go to sleep and do it again.”

Within months, he was earning steady work Home Depot’s Path to Pro, Trade skills and job matching program, and use the skills you learn at HBI to expand beyond manual repairs.

However, the real turning point came in 2024, when he returned to complete HBI’s HVAC course and met his mentor, Steven “Papa Steve” Everett. “He literally bought me a truck,” Sturgis recalls. “The truck cost $800…and he cared more about my success than the money he paid for that truck.”

He said the mentorship changed his life. “He helped me change everything from my appearance. I cut my hair and started dressing better. He brought out something in me that I never saw 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 to make its first $100,000 in its first year, a previously unimaginable feat.

Sturgess says luck He feels frustrated that the system fails to prepare people for the realities of the economy, and does not advertise the opportunities available to workers like him. “Not everyone will become a historian, not everyone will become a doctor, not everyone will become a lawyer,” he said. Working in the trades shouldn’t have a stigma, he said, because because it’s full of people with high IQs, they just use a different part of their brain than white-collar jobs. “Some people want to work with their hands,” he added.

Sturges said he believes the United States can help solve the shortage through 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 that could help them expand, train apprentices and fill the hundreds of thousands of open jobs that are left unfilled each year.

“This is how we close the gap,” he added. “By giving people the tools to build something of their own.”

But he said many young people have fallen into the trap of believing that earning a four-year college degree is the only path to success: taking on mountains of debt to obtain credentials. The stalled job market spits. Others are chasing “get-rich-quick” schemes: softer versions through sports betting or frothy startup fads, and darker versions through the black market, he said.

“Our generation is 100 percent focused on building wealth,” Sturgis said. “Our generation loves beautiful things.” You can still get these things through life in the trades, he said.

The occupations — HVAC, plumbing and electrical work — are “at the bottom of the totem pole” in how Generation Z thinks about wealth, Sturges said. However, facing the United States – The worsening labor shortage in skilled jobs, aggravated by Aggressive deportation efforts And increased demand due to the boom in artificial intelligence.

“Robots can’t build houses,” Sturges said, aligning with comments from some top leaders in the Fortune 500. For example, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has too He said He believes we will soon need hundreds of thousands of electricians to manage the massive data center boom Ford CEO Jim Farley recently revealed That his son was working as a mechanic last summer and openly wondered if he needed to go to college.

Sturges said he believes that if schools can enable Generation Z to see careers as a path to independence — rather than an alternative to “old men” — more people will follow. He explained that when you explain to the younger generation that one can make nearly six figures within a few years working in the trades, it “piques their interest.”

“And they say, ‘Wait a minute. So you mean to say, ‘I can get my hands dirty and I can make this kind of money?'” Yes, you can, Sturges said.

“It’s been a lot of trial and error, a lot of long days, and a lot of blood, sweat and tears,” he said. “But if you can get past your feelings and the valleys, it gets easier. You look down the mountain and realize how far you’ve come.”