The stack of cash sat in the center console like a challenge. Carter Grandbois, then 16 and hauling junk for a boss in Johnstown, Colorado, saw it and understood the assignment. The math was simple. He went home, talked to his dad, bought a trailer, and landed his first job: $500 for a half-hour’s work. “That was kind of an eye-opener,” Grandbois, now 18 and running Carter’s Junk Away full-time, told Fortune. Today, his business bills up to $15,000 a month. His secret to scaling wasn’t just muscle; it was a self-coded pricing calculator and lead-tracking systems that let him oversee operations from home. “Every time they complete a job,” he says of his high-school-friend employees, “we’re making anywhere from $50 to $200 without being on the truck.”
This isn’t a quirky side-hustle story. It’s a sharp, data-point in a profound economic realignment. Grandbois and peers like Levi Boyd, the 20-year-old CEO of Algo Landscaping, represent a Gen Z cohort bypassing traditional pathways—college, corporate ladders and even classic vocational training—for a new model: blue-collar entrepreneurship turbocharged by social media and SaaS tools. The U.S. Census Bureau reports a surge, with 5.6 million new business applications filed last year, nearly double the pre-pandemic rate. Yet, as the Financial Times’ John Burn-Murdoch has highlighted, non-college-educated young men have been the worst-performing demographic in the labor market for decades. This makes Grandbois and Boyd either fascinating outliers or the vanguard of a corrective trend.
The catalyst is visibility. Where previous generations might have found inspiration in a Fortune magazine profile of Warren Buffett, Grandbois cites a more visceral digital feed. “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?’” This isn’t mere envy; it’s a revelation of accessible economics. Sam Pillar, CEO of the home-services software firm Jobber, sees the 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.” His company serves over 100,000 businesses, many started by 20-somethings who, he observes, are “frustrated” by a lack of opportunity to share in capitalism’s upside. Their solution? Forge their own path, often beginning with services like dog-waste removal—a “low barrier-to-entry opportunity” that can, remarkably, scale into a million-dollar operation.
The operational playbook for this generation is written in code and content. Grandbois built his own profit-turning software. Boyd, who disclosed revenue growth from $28,000 to $323,000 (CAD) in three years to Fortune, leverages AI tools and an aggressive social media mentorship strategy, answering “every single comment, every single DM.” He actively coaches potential competitors, a radical departure from the cutthroat mindset he witnessed as a teen apprentice. “He’d look at another landscaper and be like, ‘I hate that guy,’” Boyd recalls. His philosophy is different: “There’s no shortage of work.” Their approach is systematizing intuition. Jobber’s 2024 survey of Gen Z workers found 77% want to become business owners, with nearly twice as many seeing that future in the trades (46%) as through a college degree (24%).
| Goal | Pursued By | Findings |
|---|---|---|
| Become Business Owner | 77% of Gen Z workers | Desire for entrepreneurship |
| Future in Trades | 46% | Preference over College Degree |
| College Degree | 24% | Less appealing option |
This shift exposes a stark generational rift in attitudes toward work itself. Dr. Lee Bowes, who runs the workforce-placement organization AmericaWorks, describes the young people she often sees as lacking specific goals, “very concerned” about remote work and ample time off, but with “very little sense that they have to earn those privileges.” She places partial blame on parenting and a system stuck in time, noting the federal framework for workforce development hasn’t changed since 1973. Yet, the data shows parents are adapting. Jobber’s Blue Collar Report notes a dramatic pivot: while 79% of Gen Z respondents said their parents once steered them to a four-year college, 92% of parents of younger children now say they’d encourage a skilled-trade career if their child showed interest.
- Surge in new business applications
- Decreased appeal of traditional college pathways
- Influence of social media on entrepreneurship
- Desire for autonomy and control
- Shift in parental guidance towards skilled trades
- Generational differences in employment aspirations
The implications are vast. For traditional employers, this is an accelerating talent drain. Scott Shaw, CEO of trade-school operator Lincoln Tech, observes that social media posts by welders and electricians have become more effective recruitment tools than institutional messaging. He also points a finger at corporate America, arguing that “companies in general have lost the skill of onboarding, training, mentoring people.” The resulting retention crisis, he contends, gets blamed on “disloyal” Gen Z workers, many of whom are simply opting out of a broken compact.
The endgame for these young founders isn’t just a bigger truck; it’s building an asset that doesn’t require their labor. Boyd is actively engineering his own obsolescence from day-to-day landscaping, shifting toward automated, recurring commercial contracts. “It’s more with your head than it is with your hands,” he says. Grandbois has already expanded into “junk consulting,” earning an estimated $40,000 this year coaching other entrepreneurs, many of them “40-year-old dads” he connected with online. They are building businesses to own, not just jobs to do.
This movement carries real risk, of course. There is no corporate safety net—no employer-sponsored health insurance or 401(k) for Grandbois. The physical toll of junk removal is a bet on an 18-year-old’s back. But the calculus has changed. The alternative—a costly degree leading to what Boyd calls a “miserable” bank job—holds less appeal when Instagram demonstrates a viable, commanding alternative. They are not rejecting capitalism but personalizing it, using the very tools of the digital age to reclaim the tangible, profitable work of the physical world. The stack of cash in the console wasn’t just money; it was a message. And Gen Z is busy writing the reply.
