February 22, 2026
I bought my first business at 27 years old. I had no money. Literally none. I made a deal with the seller to pay him back monthly — essentially buying the business on a note. I just made payments to him every month while I tried to figure out how to run a company.
That business did $1.6 million in sales when I bought it. This year it’ll do over $120 million.
I’ve sold other companies since then. One that my partners and I bought for zero dollars, grew, and sold — I can’t share the exact number because of a nondisclosure agreement, but let’s just say it was well over $60 million, and it happened in 16 months.
I started out in the trades sweeping floors and cleaning tools. That’s not a metaphor or a humble brag. I literally swept floors. And I want to tell anyone reading this who is at the beginning of their story: the American dream is alive and well. These things are genuinely possible.
But I want to be honest about something, because I think a lot of people in the entrepreneurship space aren’t: I got lucky. Or more accurately, I got opportunities. And I was prepared enough to take them when they came.
I think about luck the way a mentor once described it to me — luck is when preparation meets opportunity. I worked hard to be ready. I kept learning. I kept building. And when opportunities came, I was in a position to capitalize on them. When I wasn’t prepared, I missed opportunities. I still do. I miss fewer of them now than I used to, because the preparation compounds over time just like the business does.
The corollary to that is important though: most people get opportunities. The difference between the ones who build something significant and the ones who don’t usually isn’t the number of opportunities they received. It’s whether they were ready when one arrived.
I’m not going to tell you that hard work alone is enough to make you a multimillionaire. That would be dishonest. But I will tell you that hard work combined with preparation, with constantly learning, with building your skills and your network and your reputation — that is a formula that works in America. It has worked for me and for many people I know personally.
People always ask me — sometimes accusatorially — why I went to work at ServiceTitan if I was doing so well on my own. The truth is I love the work. And I love what Ara and Vahe, the co-founders, have built. They are the kind of leaders I want to be around. They set bold targets, they follow through, they make their people believe in something, and they run hard toward it. That consistency is worth a lot.
Whether you’re sweeping floors right now, or you’re running a $10 million business and trying to figure out how to get to $50 million, the principles are the same. Stay prepared. Keep learning. Build trust with the people around you. And when the opportunity comes — and it will — be ready to move.
The dream is real. I’ve lived it. And the path to it runs straight through the unglamorous, hard-working, no-excuses world of the trades.
