Carter Grandbois, the junk-removal entrepreneur of Colorado.courtesy of Carter Grandbois

Carter Grandbois was 16 years old, working for a junk-removal operator in Johnstown, Colorado, when he noticed the cash. His boss kept a thick stack of it in the center console of his truck. Grandbois went home and talked to his dad, and within days, they bought a trailer. The first job paid $500 for 30 minutes of work. “That was kind of an eye-opener,” Grandbois, now 18 and working for himself full-time, told Fortune.

Carter’s Junk Away bills as much as $15,000 a month in peak season, Grandbois said. His W-2 employees are his high school friends, but he admits that he wasn’t able to scale up and reach profitability until he created a pricing calculator, started tracking data, and started using systems to get consistent lead flows.

“I’m really into vibe-coding and creating software,” he explained. “After that, we were able to be profitable on every single job,” he said proudly. “When our team is out… they’re bidding jobs spot-on every single time. So every time they complete a job, I mean, we’re making anywhere from $50 to $200 without being on the truck.” He said he earns about $125 to $1,000 per junk-removal job and he is increasingly overseeing the business from home as he scales, which is what he means by not “being on the truck.”

Grandbois wants to share the wealth, too, via social media. (He’s on TikTok at american.junkremoval.) “I was like, ‘Hey, like everyone else could totally use this for their business.'“ Now he has two calculators—a universal one for everyone and another, “private junk-removal calculator,” which he described as detailed for a “more experienced junk-removal business.” When asked about potentially creating his own rivals, he shrugged. “That is one of the things with giving away stuff for free. You never know who’s watching the content. But at the end of the day, I know I’m doing something good for anyone else who’s trying to start.”

After all, he explained, it was his inspiration. Where another generation might have read about, say, Warren Buffett in Fortune magazine, he reflected, “it’s probably just like Instagram reels where you’re scrolling and you’re like, ‘That guy has a Lamborghini. That dude has a McLaren. Why can’t I have one of those?'“

Sam Pillar, the 44-year-old CEO and co-founder of Jobber, a home-services software company that serves over 100,000 businesses and 400,000 service professionals, sees a connection. “I think a lot of people would like to be influencers,” he told Fortune. “You kind of own your own business. You control everything.” There are a lot of overlaps, he added, between the life of an influencer and starting your own business in a blue-collar industry. (Grandbois is a Jobber client himself.)

Pillar didn’t want to “scratch too deep” on Gen Z’s famously socialistic political identity, but he does run a SaaS company for blue-collar entrepreneurs, many of them 20-somethings. He said he thinks they’re “frustrated” that “there aren’t as many opportunities to participate in the upsides of capitalism.” So they’re figuring out a new path, one that often skips college and goes straight into earning cash, with a large side dose of social media.

“One of my favorite ones is poop-scooping,” Pillar said. If you’re a 16- or 17-year-old kid with some ambition and some drive, maybe ride your bike over to a rich neighborhood, “pick up dog shit in rich people’s backyards, charge them money, you know, put the crap in their own garbage, in the garbage can. That’s a very low barrier-to-entry opportunity.” Jobber serves businesses like this, he added. “They’re million-dollar businesses now. And they were started just in that kind of a way.”

The CEO who has to replace 80% of his staff every school year

Levi Boyd has lived the overlap from both sides. The 20-year-old founder and CEO of Algo Landscaping started posting on Instagram around the same time he made his first $10,000, and says the exposure “pushed me further than anything.” He claimed he answers “every single comment, every single DM,” walking newer operators through basic questions such as which lawnmower to buy, while he also comments on bigger creators’ posts for advice.

The landscaping CEO recalled riding in a truck with the landscaper he apprenticed with as a teenager, watching the older man from another generation seethe. “He’d look at another landscaper and be like, ‘I hate that guy. Why is he working over here?’ Just pure hatred for for the other guys in the industry.” Boyd said that actually inspired him to go the other way—he’s mentored contractors that he’s never met in person, including one operator in Chicago who went from nothing to a “big truck, trailers, employees, fancy equipment. He’s doing basically what I do.”

Boyd shrugged when asked why he’s so benevolent on social media with his ostensible competitors. “There’s no shortage of work,” he said. He has grown his business tremendously with AI tools and social media, he added, disclosing revenue of roughly $28,000 (Canadian dollars) in year one, $110,000 in year two and $323,000 so far this year, figures confirmed by Fortune. “I really want to do a million,” he said, “That’s the goal. We’re gonna do a million next year, for sure.” Boyd added that he was a finance major and many of his friends from school stuck with it. “They’re working at banks now, and it just sounds miserable.” He said he thinks he’s making more mowing lawns, at least for the time being.

Grandbois and Boyd are part of a movement toward small-business entrepreneurship. Americans filed 5.6 million new business applications last year, per the Census Bureau—nearly double the pre-pandemic pace and the highest level on record. The Small Business Association says these companies account for 99.9% of all U.S. businesses and nearly nine in 10 net new jobs from 2023-2024, while they comprise 45.9% of private-sector workers. At the same time, as the Financial Times‘ John Burn-Murdoch recently noted, long-term labor-market trends have made non-college-educated young men the worst-performing cohort for decades running — making either Grandbois and Boyd into notable exceptions, or perhaps a sign of things to come.

‘A lot of this is the problem of the parents as well’

The consequences of these cultural changes hit home for Dr. Lee Bowes, who has been watching the consequences walk through the door of her for-profit workforce-placement organization, AmericaWorks, for roughly 40 years. The young people she tries to place, by and large, “don’t really, don’t have a specific goal in mind of what they care about, what their passion is for.” They arrive in her pipeline as churn—job-hopping every six months, having been told to seek their passion and instead finding a communications degree and a bad job market.

They’re “very concerned” about being able to work remotely, being able to have lots of vacation and personal time, she added, but very little sense that they have to earn those privileges. “A lot of this is the problem of the parents as well,” Bowes said, adding that she herself came from a family of “very confused bohemians”—her parents opened Boston’s first theater company, her oldest brother was a writer and her younger brother is a painter.

Bowes has actually developed a passion in her line of work: helping former convicts find meaningful work. She has spent decades helping build the prison-to-work pipeline. “The best thing in the world is to see the reality of someone’s life being changed through work.” she said. “It’s what I believe in. It’s what happened to me.” When asked if she’d say that directly to Gen Z—that she was once a skeptic and work changed her life—she didn’t hesitate. “I would be more than happy to say that to anyone.”

Bowes described a different example in an employee, the daughter of immigrants (“thank God for immigrants,” she said), who she said was very practical when it came to choosing a major. Not only is that a rare kind of intentionality, but the federal government has gone missing. She said she often talks with the Department of Labor about how its federal framework governing workforce placement is unchanged since 1973: “hasn’t changed at all.”

The parental influence

The parental shift is becoming visible in the data. Three years ago, 79% of Gen Z respondents told Jobber’s Blue Collar Report that their parents had steered them toward four-year college, and only 5% considered vocational school an option. Today, 92% of the parents of younger children say they would encourage a skilled-trade career if their child expressed interest. Now, long-term job stability comes first, but 40% of Gen Z also say they learned about the trades too late to seriously consider them.

Levi Boyd’s parents lived the reversal in real time. They were “never really super financially literate,” he said, part of why they pushed him toward a four-year business degree. “They did not want me to mow lawns,” he said. He was a good student and finished two years of post-secondary education but he doesn’t regret dropping out.

“I was just a good regurgitator,” Boyd said, “I wasn’t actually learning much, but yeah, I had a good GPA.” He couldn’t get over how expensive it was and doesn’t expect to go back. “I get way more way more information from just scrolling on Instagram, honestly in a couple hours every day—way more applicable knowledge is just at my fingertips.” He said it’s helping him land deals, too—he learned from Instagram how to apply a big logo to his trailer and landed a big commercial property as a client afterward. “Our biggest contract to date.”

Scott Shaw spent over a decade in private equity before 22 years at the trade-school operator Lincoln Tech, based in New Jersey, where he is now the CEO. He said the biggest change that he’s observed, by far, was social media. Welders and electricians began posting about their workdays, and those videos served as more effective recruitment than decades of messaging from institutions like his. “I’m surprised that they attract so much attention,” he said, “but they’re educating folks.”

There’s always been an entrepreneurial vein in America, Shaw allows, and the default has been becoming a tech millionaire (or more). “People realize that going into the trades, you can be your own boss, too,” he said.

It’s the realization that Grandbois had at 16 standing next to his boss’ truck and Boyd had when he started scaling his landscaping crews—and it’s the thesis on which Pillar built his tech company. Jobber’s survey of Gen Z workers this year found that 77% say they want to become business owners, and nearly twice as many see that happening through the trades than college (46% vs. 24%).

Junk removal is physical work, and Carter is betting on a body that is 18 years old. Carter doesn’t have traditional employer health insurance, 401(k) or other credentials to fall back on.

In the corporate sector, according to Shaw, it seems that “companies in general have lost the skill of onboarding, training, mentoring people.” Then Gen Z gets blamed, sometimes by sources like Bowes, for being disloyal and job-hopping. Shaw argues that the retention crisis was created by employers and gets blamed on workers, and many of his students are opting out of that.

Grandbois may not have a Lamborghini yet, but he was able to buy a Ford F-250 (lightly used, 10,000 miles) and his business has expanded into a kind of junk consulting. “We’ve started to do coaching to help other people who are interested in junk removal scale really quick,” he said, estimating that it was a 50-50 split for his business, and he’s made about $40,000 this year from junk coaching. Thanks to social media, he added, “we have a bunch of 40-year-old dads who are also interested in starting a business like this.”

Boyd is trying to engineer his own obsolescence. “I just want to automate this this whole thing and be completely separated from it,” he said. An avid AI user—including Jobber’s AI receptionist—he said he’s shifting his company away from landscaping installs toward recurring commercial-maintenance contracts, with the goal of fully removing himself from day-to-day-fieldwork. He’s guessing he’s about two-and-a-half years out. The hard part isn’t scaling anymore, but stepping back from the work that made his money in the first place. “It’s more with your head than it is with your hands.”