Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Built: The Fifth-Generation Contactor's Manifesto for Debt Free, AI Proof Success in the Golden Age of the Trades

Built: The Fifth-Generation Contactor's Manifesto for Debt Free, AI Proof Success in the Golden Age of the Trades

Paperback

Young Adult Nonfiction

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN13: 9798191358857
Publisher: Independently Published
Pages: 248
Weight: 0.74
Height: 0.52 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
THE DOOR NOBODY TOLD YOU ABOUT IS WIDE OPEN.

America is entering the largest building boom in three generations - trillions of dollars in factories, power plants, chip fabs, and AI data centers - and there are not enough skilled hands to build it.

Meanwhile, the path everyone calls safe - four years, a degree, a desk - now comes with crushing debt and a job market that artificial intelligence is shaking to its core.

Somebody should have told you there was another road.

WRITTEN BY A MAN WHO ACTUALLY DID IT

Steve Philipp Jr. is a fifth-generation contractor whose family has been in the trades since 1870. He started sweeping sandblast media into drums at thirteen and spent thirty-six years working up to running the company - a business whose crews protect airports, defense facilities, and industrial infrastructure across America.

He has hired hundreds of young people and watched some of them build extraordinary lives. He has also watched sharp kids sign loan papers for degrees that never paid them back, and he got tired of saying nothing.

BUILT is what he would tell his own kid.

WHAT'S INSIDE

- THE REAL MATH. Trade path against college path, dollar for dollar, year by year - including what a thirteen-year head start on saving is actually worth. The number is close to three million dollars.

- HOW TO GET IN. How to pick the trade that fits how your brain works, how to land a paid apprenticeship, what the aptitude test looks like, and what to say when you call.

- THE FOUR SHOW-UPS. Show up early. Show up sober. Show up ready. Show up tomorrow. The habits that separate the people who rise from the people who get let go - including one story about the kid with the best hands on the crew who lost the job anyway.

- THE BUILDER'S LADDER. The full path from apprentice to journeyman to foreman to superintendent to project manager to owner, with real pay ranges at every rung.

- WHY THE JOB SITE IS AI-PROOF. Robots conquered the factory floor sixty years ago and still can't touch a job site. The reason has nothing to do with better hands.

- TURNING A PAYCHECK INTO WEALTH. Pensions, 401(k) matches, the truck trap that eats young tradesmen alive, and the boring math that turns forty dollars an hour into a paid-off life.

- PUTTING YOUR NAME ON THE TRUCK. What it takes to own the company - and why a generation of contractors is aging out right now with nobody to hand the keys to.

WHO THIS IS FOR

The seventeen-year-old who is good with his hands and has been told, gently and constantly, that college is the only respectable option. The parent lying awake wondering whether they are steering their kid into six figures of debt for a degree an algorithm may make worthless. The twenty-nine-year-old in a cubicle watching AI eat their department one function at a time. The veteran who already has the discipline and just needs somebody to point at the door. And every teacher and counselor who has known for years that the default advice stopped being true.

THIS BOOK IS NOT ANTI-COLLEGE

Some kids belong in a lecture hall. The future surgeon, the future engineer, the kid who lights up in a chemistry lab - go, and go with everything you've got.

This book is anti-default. It is against the unexamined assumption that one path is right for every kid, when the evidence in front of us says otherwise.

The country is short hundreds of thousands of skilled workers. The work pays. It cannot be offshored and it cannot be automated. And almost nobody is telling young people the door is open.

Consider yourself told.

Skip the debt. Pick up the tools. Build a life worth a damn.

Also in

Young Adult Nonfiction

View All