June 15, 2026
I never really left the trade
People assume I left the trade for the classroom. I never really left, and this year I built a business quiet enough to prove it.
People who meet me now meet a teacher. Program coordinator, professor, the guy at the front of the room explaining combustion and code. They assume that somewhere along the way I traded the service truck for a whiteboard and left the trade behind. I didn't. I never really left. The honest version is more complicated than the tidy one, and for a stretch it was a lot darker.
Here is the tidy version: I ran my own heating and cooling business for eleven years, started teaching in 2017, and by 2022 I had wound the business down to focus on the classroom full time. All of that is true. It just leaves out the part where the bottom fell out.
A few hard things landed close together. A loss I won't get into here. A marriage that ended. A pandemic that shut the world in on itself. And underneath all of it, a body that was quietly failing in ways nobody had diagnosed yet. I've written about that last part separately. What I'll say here is that the man who wound that business down in 2022 wasn't making a calm career decision. He was running on empty. The drive was gone. The ambition was gone. I told people I was stepping back to teach, and I was, but teaching was also about all I had the strength left to do.
So no, I didn't leave the trade for the classroom the way it looks from the outside. I got knocked flat, and the business was one of the things I had to set down because I couldn't carry everything at once.
But the trade itself never left me. That's the part I want to get right. You don't stop being a gas technician because you're not pulling a permit that week. The knowledge doesn't drain out. The instinct for how a system fails, the read on a bad combustion, the logic of a venting problem, the clause in B149 that answers the question the customer is actually asking: all of it stayed. I taught it every day. I lived in it. If anything, teaching the trade forced me to understand it more deeply than running calls ever did, because you can do a thing correctly for twenty years without being able to explain why it works.
And then I got better. The short version is that the thing draining me for twenty-five years finally got caught and treated at the end of 2024. I won't rehearse all of it here. What matters for this piece is what came back with my health: the drive, the ambition, the want to build something again. I'm healthier at forty-nine than I was at twenty-nine, and for the first time in my adult life my body and my head are both working with me instead of against me. When that happens, you don't just go back to getting by. You start looking for the next thing to make.
Which brings me to this year. In 2026 I started a new HVAC company, ServiceFirst HVAC Solutions. Not to replace teaching, and I want to be clear about that because it matters: coordinating the program is the priority, and it stays the priority. I am not splitting myself between two full-time jobs.
I built ServiceFirst to run without me at the center of it. The booking, the dispatch, the quoting, the invoicing, even an intake pipeline that turns a voicemail into a job card on its own: all of it is automated. Just as deliberately, the field work is built to scale with technicians, not with my calendar. The jobs get handled by techs on the ground while the systems handle the paperwork. That is what keeps me available to teach and coordinate full time, which is the whole point. I fill in where my schedule allows, but the business does not depend on me being on the tools between nine and five, and it was designed that way on purpose.
The part I didn't expect to value as much as I do is the mentoring. Working alongside technicians, the new ones finding their footing and the seasoned ones I still learn from, keeps me in the living version of the trade. Every odd failure, every unfamiliar piece of equipment, every code question that comes up on a real job is a current, real-world scenario I can carry straight into the classroom the next week. That is the win on both sides. Staying in the field and fostering technicians makes me a sharper instructor, and because the business is staffed and automated to run without me hovering over it, none of that comes out of my students' time or the program's. The trade feeds the classroom. The classroom gets my attention. Nobody loses.
So when people ask whether I miss the trade, or whether I'll ever go back to it, I tell them the same thing I told you at the top. I never really left. I just had to get healthy enough, and whole enough, to carry all of it again. It turns out the same instinct that reads a failing furnace reads a failing body, and runs a business, and writes the code that keeps it running. Systems are systems. I'm just glad to be back to running mine.