In the first episode of From the Ground Up, host Jen DeVito sits down with her parents, David and Joann Johansen of Johansen Excavating. Forty years and 30 employees later, the Johansens look back on starting out with nothing but a truck and a work ethic, the risks they took, the ones they didn't, and the hard lessons that came from staying debt free while building a business from the ground up.

The conversation moves through the sacrifices of raising four kids while running a company, the discipline of paying off equipment before buying more, and the instinct for calculated risk that shaped how Jen approaches her own business today. It closes on one of the most personal threads of the episode: growing up on job sites, running excavators as a kid, and watching her mother earn respect in a male dominated industry, and how that shaped Jen's own mission to bring transparency and change to residential general contracting.

This episode is about hard work, independence, and what it really takes to build something from the ground up.