How Blue-Collar Careers Became the Smartest Investment

The students can come in and get a high level of knowledge and certification in six weeks

time. We make it as easy and streamlined as we possibly can. It is the most efficient trades training program in the country today.

“Arvin Key is a visionary entrepreneur, career education leader, and the co-founder of Forge”

Now. Drawing from his mission to strengthen America's skilled trades workforce, he helps people build sustainable, fulfilling careers while creating opportunities for veterans and communities across the country. There is a real career path for the trades.

The skilled trades, electricians, plumbers, age-fact technicians, the welders, they cannot be AI.

There is no AI agent that can go up in your attic and fix your AC during the heat of the summer.

Most people aren't aware of how much money that you can make in the trades. We have had graduates from our company inside of 12 months make six figures. That's an outlier. It's not typical. It spans the goal, like a super-highest goal, into their health, and ready to fight for

you. Today, Apple is going to reinvent the fall. It's not over! I'm telling how we're... The living your legacy podcast for those who live to leave a legacy.

Welcome back everyone to another episode of "Living Your Legacy" podcast.

I'm your host again, Jay Slangin, and we're down here in the semi-new now.

We've been here for a month, but the new studios here at South Beach, Miami, and I've been talking to them to this guy, how much I love it here, but yeah, you've got to come down. But we're here. We get the opportunity to speak with a lot of the greatest entrepreneurs and disruptors all the ground up the country, and we've got someone here for Blue Color America, tell us

your name? Marvel? And what do you do?

“My name is Marvin Key, I am the co-founder and CEO of a company called Forge Now.”

We're based in the Dallas Fort Worth Metroplex Dallas Texas. All right, so you've got some great brandy here, I see a Forge Now on your Sure, very professional design. What is Forge Now? Forge Now is an accelerated technical skills training company.

So what does that mean? Yeah. What that means is, in the period of six weeks, we can take a candidate who has no training of any kind, has zero skills. Yeah.

And we can take that person, and we can produce a skilled trained, credentialed technician in HVAC, in electrical, and in plumbing, and in data centers, in six weeks time. Well, pair them in that amount of time, and they're ready for the workforce after six weeks. Gotcha.

And that's so important these days with AI and people getting kicked out of the workforce or trying to reinvacuum cells. Boy, you said it, the skilled trades, electricians, plumbers, HVAC technicians, the welders, they cannot be AIed, they cannot be off-shoreed. There is no AI agent that can go up in your attic and fix your AC during the heat of the

summer, like you have in Miami and like we have in Dallas, you're absolutely right. So for somebody, even a professional who's worried about their career trajectory in their field, our job here in the job of my company is to show people that there is another alternative that you perhaps have not considered. All right.

“So you say accelerated, we can also say fast-track, right?”

You can say fast-track. So like a six-week kind of fast-track kind of master course on different areas of the blue color workforce. What kind of people do you see coming into your offices, offices, classrooms? Yeah, well, we have a 75,000 square foot facility north of Dallas, Fort Worth airport.

There you go. It's full of classrooms and labs, so I would say that about 40% of what we train in that six, six-week period is classroom time, but most of the people who come to us come to us because they want to work on the equipment and the labs, they want to turn the tools, they want to learn on the actual equipment that they'll be using in the field.

Our mantra is train how you fight, so we make our training facility as realistic as a candidate

Yeah, in terms of who we typically train, I would say about 60% of those who come to train

with us are affiliated with the military, they're either wrapping up their military careers on active service or they're already veterans, these are all they say they're transitioning into civilian life. They're transitioning into civilian life and they've been in this very insular military society and a lot of them don't know what to do next.

If you've been an infantryman in the Marines or in the army, or you know how to drive a tank, what do you do in civilian life? Most of these guys go into police forces, there are other options for them, and so what we do with our accelerated training is we take somebody with no skills and but who wants to find a new career trajectory, we can help them with that and we train them up to do that.

So as well, beyond the military, that's about 60% of our students, the other 40% are a combination of high school students who have decided that college is not the right path for them.

“We also train college students, 40% of whom never finish college, right?”

We call them false starts. We train somebody who is under-employed, perhaps they're capable, but they're working in a warehouse and they don't see a future in that role and they want to take on additional responsibility. If you're a trucker, a long haul trucker, you make a really good money.

You can make $100, $125,000 a year doing that, but you never see your family, you never

sleep in your own bed. So we see that kind of thing, so look, increasingly, people realize are beginning to understand that there is a real career path to the trades and the fact of the matter is that the people in the trades are getting older and older and older and they're retiring and not enough people are coming and buying them.

So for every five people who leave the trades only two are replacing them. This is at the exact same time that the demand for their services is going up, solar farms, data centers, manufacturing facilities. So the supply of technicians continues to fall while the demand for their services continues to rise.

What does that mean? What you're going to have to pay those professions going forward is going to continue to rise.

“So that goes into some of my next questions, right?”

So are you training them on large corporations come to you and they need specific positions filled or industries need a certain position filled or is it like those small blue-collar businesses like the HVAC business or that goes from home to home, right? And they need their air cons fixed, so they need their plumbing fixed, where do you guys lie on that special?

That's a very interesting question. So we have placed our graduates now, we've graduated over 2,000 technicians. They've gone to work in 40 different states in our country, at over 250 different employers. So it's a very fragmented industry for the trades. Most of our people go into companies that take care of residential consumers, okay, right?

They're going into homes, they're fixing homes, they're going into addicts, that kind of thing. However, as our number of graduates rise, we're increasingly having conversations with very large corporations, some of the largest in the nation, names that your audience will recognize that we'd need, or much bigger than that, much bigger than that.

Company coming to us and saying, we need 1,000 electricians at our company next year.

We want to talk to you about basically being our outsourced training partner.

So most of what we do is sending people into the residential home services world. But increasingly we're having conversation with large companies who are interested in working with us to help build their own workforce. Sure. And so everyone loves the fast track, six weeks in and out, right?

Yep. But they do multiple courses also, 'cause they're like a three month program as well. No, we don't do that. We modeled our training program after the US military, it's a short term, it's immersive intense, it's full time.

It's 7 a.m. to 330 p.m. five days a week for six straight weeks.

“You have to pass an assessment and a test before you can move on to the next week.”

So we hold them to a high level of accountability. We're throwing them in the deep end, we're challenging them in this immersive hands-on

So it's intended to be stressful, just like bootcamp is.

“What's the best way to learn a new language?”

Study tapes in your car, going back and forth to work, or is it to go live at the family for 90 days in the middle of Paris and do nothing but speak French? Maybe Mary and French girls or that approach too. So it's an immersion philosophy, is the path we're taking.

So look, I think that the value of what we do is it's a game changer for the students

who come through our program because while we are teaching HVAC and we're teaching electrical, the fact that they can do it in six weeks, six weeks is the attention grabber for them. And for whatever reason, no one else out there is really doing that. So we're doing something that everyone else is an offering. So we're a game changer for a couple of reasons.

The students can come in and get a high level of knowledge and certification in six weeks time and the employers who need them now because of the shortage that they have need them now. They don't need them in six months or 12 months or 24 months. They need those candidates now.

Right on. So you're kind of like, you know, in the matrix when they upgrade, they upgrade, they upgrade the programs. He's like, wow, I know karate now, you know, but it's like six weeks. They learn this skills.

Yeah. Yeah. And so it would be natural for an employer who's listening to this and say, what can they possibly learn in six weeks, we get it, we hear that a lot and we've had that level of skepticism before.

But what's what you're offering is also very inspiring to these people, you know, they're in that confused state. They're trying to figure out what they're doing in this civilian life.

“They go through your program and only take some six weeks, right?”

And I'm sure they're inspired to just get out there in the workforce. And do you have employers that are kind of picking from your graduates as well? I'm 100% as early as week three in the six week program. Yeah. We have students receiving job offers.

So yes. So we have a lot of our employers come back to us, cohort after cohort, after cohort, to build their work forces. So absolutely that happened. Hmm.

Okay. It's how many courses are off together, you guys off? We only offer currently, we offer four programs. We offer an HFAC maintenance program. We have an electrical wiring program, a plumbing program.

When we are piloting and about to roll out four new data center centric programs, two on the data center, build side to construct the data centers and two on the data center operating side. So we're soon to have probably by the end of the first quarter, eight programs in total. They're all six weeks in length, they're all full time and they're operated the exact

same way. Yeah. Yeah. That data center one is going to be very important coming up. If it's not already right now.

It already is.

And you know, Mike Roe, who a lot of people have heard of, you know, who's always out

talking about the trades and who's brand is built on the trades, is very vocal about talking about some of the data center electricians out in abling Texas, making over $250,000 a year as an electrician in a data center.

“So the future is bright if you want to put the work in.”

Yeah. And so what inspired you guys to kind of do this? Or, let me ask this, are you guys bootstrapping this? You guys got investors for this? How do you guys get this off the ground?

My partner and I, Rob Holmes, and I started this business and self-enhanced it for about the first 18 months. But we do have investors. And most of them are down on that, you know, investment thing is very difficult, right? It is difficult.

Did you see investors? Did you invest? No, it's, it, it, it mainly are high net worth individuals, family offices, investment advisors from the Dallas community. Right.

People who we have networked with, who know us, who believe in our, in our mission. We have no institutional capital at the company, and that is by design at this point. Perfect. Well done. Congrats on that.

Well, so far so good. Yeah. No, I mean, no, because that, that whole, getting investors thing, it, it can be, yeah. It is. Let me tell you something, it's even more stressful.

We started the company in mid 2018, but we didn't generate revenue, we didn't host our

first class until January of 2020, 60 days before COVID hit.

All right. So we just started opening the doors in January, you know, in March, the country shuts down. So let's just say the first two years of our operations were stressful times for us. Yeah.

And so first two years of operations, stressful times, right? How did you network to find these high network individuals and these people that you kind of, you didn't have to go to institutional capital, right? So a lot of our, a lot of our businesses out there, people listening, right, are be like, how did they tap into that?

Well, look, the, the contractor, the contractor community in most towns are, are the

the Collins Avenue, right there, they're lower profile, hardworking business people that

have been, that have been building their businesses for a number of years, you know, have brought, have built a lot of brand equity, Dallas Fort Worth Market, you know, it's a seventh largest economy in the world, there is a lot of concentrated wealth in that community. And it was just a matter of getting out and making a lot of meetings with a lot of different people.

This was, we're doing something that has a feel good element to it. We are helping to build the, the, the pie provide, increase the universe of available technicians, which is a lot of a goal, they're in huge demand and we're doing it a way that is very different and very efficient. And so the price point of our, of our training relative to the time we go through,

relative to the results that we produce are excellent.

“So I think that most of the people that we spoke to said, wow, this is a great idea, I'd”

love to get behind this. I believe in what you're doing, let me help, and so we've seen a lot of that.

And for some of the equipment that you guys have in your facility, in my mind, you know,

can you get sponsors for that, like the HVAC stuff, right? Are they, are you allowed to say, hey, look, I got a training facility, right? They're going to be learning, you know, different units, right? Can use suppliers or units, and then they're specialized in your equipment. If there are any OEMs out there listening to this podcast, we would love the opportunity

to, to do that very thing. We have talked to, to manufacturers about that. We have not been successful at having anything donated. What we do do is go around to a lot of the contractors and the Dallas Fort Worth area and get their scratched and dented stuff.

They cannot use, and we buy that at big discounts off the dollar and our new, our new students, when they're just getting started in their training, work on the older busted up stuff. Yeah. But the newer higher-end simulators that we create around the company, we go out and

purchase those, so, but we are a dealer, so we're buying this wholesale, but no, we do have some capital, capital spending that we have to, that we have to, you know, keep up with. Yeah.

“So, I asked everyone, what are you most excited about these days?”

I'm most excited, I think, that I believe that we are about to get to long-term sustainability within our business. People are beginning to buy into the fact that college is not the only path to success. I just have my guys this morning on Blue Color America, say the same exact thing. It's unbelievable, our, you know, the last 30 years, one whole generation, possibly more,

has been told, go to college, take on all this debt, and you will be successful. Yeah. And it's work for some people. I want to college, but it's not for everybody, and there, people are starting to seriously question whether spending $203,400, $400,000 to get a bachelor's degree is money

well spent. Yeah. That's right. It's very questionable. It's questionable.

Yeah. It's questionable. Investments. That would be in your high-risk bucket. You get no argument for me.

So, I mean, from our perspective, the average starting wage for a bachelor's degree in our country over the last 10 years has not changed. It's been flat. Yeah. Cost of living's gone up, everything's gone up, but the starting wage on average of a college

degree is somewhere in the 57 to 60,000 dollars a year range. Yeah. Okay. And that probably doesn't even include all the internships that you got to work for free after college.

Yeah. Well, that's another thing.

“What's the opportunity cost of having to go to college?”

And by the way, the average college graduate now graduates in 5.2 years, not four. No, okay. What? It's a whole other year of tuition, whole other year of housing, whole other years of fees.

So, it goes on and on and on. So, what could you have earned working during that time? We did it in four years and we were boozing hard. Yeah. Wow, you were a fun, more fun guy than I was obviously.

No. So, look, our whole pitch is return on investment. What do you get for the money that you invest in? Part of it, frankly, is educating the parents. Some of the parents are so committed, they think, they still believe, oh, you know,

Johnny and Susie, they need to, they need to go to college, it's the only path.

Not all the kids always believe that, but they're too, they're too scared to go tell their

parents, they don't want to go to college and it's not the path for them. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, look, I think that, I think we've got the, we've got the opportunity to change the thinking about the appeal of the trades, it's a cost of higher education.

So, our graduates, if you compare our graduates now to what somebody going to college starting

“college now and graduating in that 5.2 years, which I just mentioned to you, our graduates”

will earn over $300,000 of income before those college graduates ever get their first job and

they're going to have $100,000 worth of debt on top of it. And these are things you're saying, the college graduate, they're starting entry level salaries, they haven't changed. No, it's our business, they're going up, you know, like the service is like it's getting more expensive.

And yes, they are rising, that is absolutely what I'm saying.

We have had graduates from our company inside of 12 months, makes six figures. Yeah. That's an outlier, that's not typical, but do we have guys making $75, $80,000 with them 12 months of finishing our program? Absolutely. Well, it's been fantastic to have you. How do people find you?

Forge now.edu, F-O-R-G-E, N-O-W.edu, we're in Dallas, Texas. Let me tell you one last thing.

“Six weeks of training, full time, lifetime career services and placement. That's how we”

get people employed in 40 different states. All of our students get full uniform and safety kit that we provide. All of our students receive catered lunch every single day at you on campus. Every single student gets a Milwaukee set of tools specific to his trade. And if you're from out of town, we house you as part of tuition. You are with a roommate and an apartment, one mile from our campus, we house you. So we make it as easy and

a streamlined as we possibly can. It is the most efficient trade-straining program in the country today. There you go. You guys really are at the heart of Blue Color America. We're absolutely at the heart and we're trying to increase the supply of technicians and educate families and communities about the value they contribute.

“Well, hopefully this podcast helps them and your episode helps them. But honestly, it's been”

a pleasure to talk into what an amazing business and you can see my mind's already buzzing

with different ideas of how you can get sponsorships and there's all kinds of you guys got it down. I hope so. I think we're there and we hope a little bit of the notoriety or publicity that we get from our program or a platform like this. We're hoping to help us and roll more or more candidates. Perfect, man. Thanks, Jack. Great. Thanks for joining us and stay too for another episode.

You guys got to check out when his episode drops Blue Color America where we talked about the backbone of America. You know the tradesmen, the HVAC people and all right, there you go. There you have it, people. Thank you for joining us and we'll see you next time. Cheers, everyone. (upbeat music)