Chris Black spent 35 years in IT, cybersecurity, and enterprise sales before retiring. His financial planner was managing his savings. His future was sitting in the market. One conversation changed the trajectory: he told his planner he thought he could make more money with his…

Mitch Smedley has been a plumber for 25 years. In January 2020, he decided to start his own company. He opened Smedley Plumbing on August 1 of that year, directly into COVID-level uncertainty. Five years later, he sold 90 percent of the business and retained…

Jason Nemus was sleeping on a friend’s living room floor with a trash bag of clothes when he first got started in network marketing. Over the next decade, he built a career that put him on stages in front of 26,000 people. When the company…

Tim Kanak didn’t set out to become a roofer. He had a master’s degree in education and plans to coach high school football in Miami when he spent a summer working for his father-in-law’s roofing company at $15 an hour. That was well over a…

On the day Kassandra Hornik and her husband Shane officially turned on the phones for Honey Go Fix It, they sat around the dining room table in Dayton, Ohio with Shane’s brother-in-law Tyler. They had done their research. They had run the numbers. They were…

At two in the morning, Brent Garrett was staring at the ceiling trying to figure out how he was going to explain what was happening to his wife, his kids, and his vendors. The speaking business was thriving. The plumbing business was nearly a million…

Jeremy Griffin describes himself as the quiet guy in the back of the class who does not like to raise his hand. Doing a podcast, he says, pushes him out of his comfort zone. Getting out of his comfort zone is the entire story of…

Somewhere at Budd’s Plumbing, Heating, and Cooling in Cape May, New Jersey, there is a box full of front door keys. They belong to the homeowners, mostly second homeowners and seasonal residents, who trust Michael Budd and his team enough to leave access to their…

Mehdi Khachani was presenting his biomedical engineering thesis at an IEEE conference in Shanghai when a man handed him a business card. The man said his company might be interested in hiring him. Mehdi went back to Montreal, did a project for them, and got…

Scott Whitaker started cleaning carpets in Las Vegas casinos in high school. He worked in the auto industry. He became a firefighter. He opened a carpet cleaning company in Spokane to keep his wife at home with their kids. And somewhere in the middle of…