I grew up in Section 8 housing. Government assistance. Free lunch program. The kind of childhood where you learn early that nobody is coming to save you.
That lesson turned out to be the most valuable thing I ever learned.
The Path
I studied civil engineering at Prairie View A&M. Graduated in 2020 with a BS in Civil Engineering. Went into oil and gas infrastructure. Spent 6 years designing pipe supports, equipment foundations, and structural steel for facilities on the Gulf Coast and in the Permian Basin.
Good money. Stable work. But I was building someone else's thing.
The Shift
In February 2026, I started building my own. Not one business. Six. Real estate wholesaling, demolition, structural steel detailing, valet trash for apartments, credit repair, and mineral rights acquisition. All under one holding company called Load Bearing Empire.
People said I was crazy. Six businesses at once? While working full time? From your phone?
They were not wrong about the workload. They were wrong about the approach.
The System
I did not try to manually run 6 businesses. I built infrastructure. One Supabase database with 142 tables. 48 edge functions. 38 scheduled jobs. AI agents handling phone calls, lead scoring, content publishing, and email outreach.
The businesses run on the system. I build the system. That is the difference between working IN your business and working ON your business.
The Mindset
When you grow up with nothing, you learn to build with whatever you have. I did not have a dev team. I had Claude. I did not have a marketing budget. I had a content pipeline. I did not have office space. I had a phone and a VPS.
The constraint is the advantage. When you cannot buy your way out of a problem, you build your way out. And what you build, you own.
Where I Am Now
32 articles published on dev.to. A structural calculation tool live in production. An 8-agent AI system managing operations. A new role as Lead Structural Engineer starting April 20th. And I am writing this on Easter Sunday because the build does not stop for holidays.
If you are reading this from a place that looks nothing like where you want to be, keep building. The gap between where you are and where you want to be is just infrastructure you have not built yet.
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