This 26-year-old blue-collar business earns $1.3 million a year

As a child, Zemes Chew wanted to work in a white-collar job at a company like Google, but his career took a different direction. The 26-year-old now runs Singapore-based handyman service Repair.sg with his 24-year-old brother and co-founder Amos Chew.

Singapore-based company Repair.sg brought in S$1.7 million (approximately $1.3 million) in 2024, according to documents seen by CNBC Make It.

“When I was young, my dream was always to work for a major technology company,” Chu said. But one day in early 2016, he noticed a gap in the market.

“Our parents were looking for a service provider to repair things around the house,” said Chu. “I was just looking online and…back in the day, there was (seemed like) no place to find service providers (online). So I…was like, let’s put together a website and see what happens from there.”

So, at the age of 16, Chew spent S$30 (about $23) to buy a domain name for a website, enlisted his father to help him register the company, and Repair.sg was born.

Nearly a decade later, the company that started as a blue-collar side hustle by two brothers now has more than 20 employees and is on track to generate about $2.3 million by 2025, according to documents seen by CNBC Make It.

As children, Brother Chu loved being hands-on.

“My brother and I used to do everything together: building Legos, building PCs, taking things apart,” Chu said. “(We) have always built projects together, and it was our dream to work together when we grew up.”

The two were able to realize this dream as teenagers after launching Repair.sg. Chu said the company slowly gained momentum and started growing rapidly in the last few years.

During their first three years at the company, the brothers were still students and had to find work for the business in between classes and at night.

“What a lot of people don’t know is that there’s a lot of education (and) licensing behind some of the services that we do, and it’s more than just holding a screwdriver and a hammer and doing things,” he said. So they spent years acquiring the knowledge, skills, and licenses they needed to run their business.

Also, before the business expanded, they took on most of the work themselves, such as replacing lights and repairing furniture. “For the first seven years, probably until early 2024, (the business) was basically moribund most of the time,” Chu said. “We were young and not very good managers.”

Chu said that in the early days, he and his brother would do whatever people were willing to hire them to do, going so far as to set alarms for 4 a.m. to make sure they responded to early messages from potential customers.

Throughout this period, Chu said he learned many hard lessons, including some jobs he shouldn’t have taken.

“[Maybe]the expectations were completely different, or maybe the price was just so low that it was painful for us, or… they just weren’t very nice people,” he said. “We just accepted whatever came our way, because we believed in the conventional wisdom that we were less than others or not respected. So we were just grateful for what we got.”

It wasn’t until 2021, when the two brothers decided to turn their hobby into a full-fledged business, that Repair.sg began to grow and scale. The two also decided not to attend university so they could focus on business instead.

The Chu brothers are part of a wave of Gen Zers who are choosing blue-collar industries over white-collar ones and, in some cases, choosing blue-collar industries over going to college.

While the two enjoy their jobs, Chu said they face a lot of backlash from parents and strangers alike. “Ever since we were kids, our parents always said things like: ‘If you don’t study hard, you’re going to end up in a manual labor job, and it’s going to be terrible. Don’t you want to sit in an air-conditioned office?'” he said.

“(And) when we started talking to (customers)…they said to our faces, ‘You guys are kids. You should be in school, you shouldn’t be doing this kind of work. This is for people who, quote unquote, aren’t doing well in life,” he said.

Because of the social stigma associated with blue-collar work, Chu said she tried to keep her and her brother’s jobs secret for a while.

“We always felt very anxious about what we were doing because, while we were enjoying it, negative emotions were getting to us. So we decided not to publicize that we were doing this,” he said.

But he now realized that fundamentally the work they provide creates great value for customers. Additionally, he enjoys his job and loves working with his brothers. In the end, it was more important than how others viewed my profession.

“I’m optimistic about the future of this sector,” he said, adding that the number of young people entering the blue-collar industry has increased in recent years. In fact, Chu says some of his friends have left white-collar jobs for blue-collar jobs, and “many of them are happier than they were before.”

“I’m glad I didn’t have to listen to anyone’s opinion (to continue) because if I had to sit in an air-conditioned office five days a week and type on a computer, I don’t think I would have experienced the same amount of happiness, fulfillment and joy that I have now running this business with my brother,” Chu said.

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