Patent Attorney and Founder
But Steve, if you would provide details about your background, let them know kind of where you grew up, what’s your family like, where you went to school, and what are some of your interests?
Sure, let me go ahead and kick it off. Yeah, go forward. So, I have an interesting background. My father was a private pilot. We worked on airplanes just about every day, every weekend, my entire childhood, and I always expected to be a pilot. I was signed into the Air Force pilot program right out of high school, went in, took my first physical, and found out I had an astigmatism I had never known about. So, kind of crushed my pilot dreams right there out of high school. Still love to fly but can’t do it professionally or at least in the military. So, I thought the next best thing was going to be going into engineering, maybe designing planes, working on the design of aircraft. You know, but that’s not the same thing as flying, so that A-Tech personality that I had really didn’t get fulfilled in the engineering world.
So, when I got out of school, spent a brief period working for other companies, and that anti-personality really saw that I was going to be driven by starting my own companies. So, started early on in small contracting companies; we did lighting fixtures, ceiling fans, window coverings, and worked for some of the big national hardware stores. Grew that into more complex contracting, roofing companies, things like that, and ultimately grew into a very large landscaping company, one of the top 50 landscaping companies in the nation. And it was a great experience, but I think we all know what the labor pool is like these days and the challenges that you have in a business like that. So, I was looking for something less reliant on the labor pool, and so I wanted to start my own business in an internet-based business.
So, going back to my family, we grew up and were raised in Arizona, and we were very active here. We’re always outside, riding dirt bikes, going to the lake, staying in shape, and that was very important to me. And my family always went to the gym, stayed in shape, and then COVID happened, and everything got shut down, including the gyms. So basically, I was relegated to working out at home, and I had to figure out the best way for me to work out at home. Didn’t have the space to put the big huge rug racks in and all the weight plates and everything else. I just had a little bit of space in my garage that I could dedicate to building a home gym. Had some bands, and with the bands, they were good. They really provided an interesting way to work out, but they didn’t give me the dynamics I wanted of squats and overhead presses and everything else because typically attach it under the door or over the door to the doorknob, and it just really didn’t work out that well. So, with my engineering background, started tinkering, started playing with things, and came up with an idea to separate the bands out, get a couple of sets of bands found in a local shop to fabricate it, and that’s where Home Strong began.