Before Cale Forester was running a multimillion-dollar plumbing company in Tulsa, Oklahoma, he says he spent roughly a year moving between the streets, abandoned houses and a place underneath a bridge that he eventually began calling home. Drug addiction had taken over much of his life, his relationship with his family had deteriorated, and encounters with police had become common enough that Cale estimates he was arrested at least 10 to 12 times.
Daily life had become about finding enough money to get through the next few hours. Cale has described walking to gas stations and asking strangers for dollars, visiting the restaurant where his sister worked in hopes of getting a meal, and spending nights in places without electricity, water or heat. At one point, police found him badly beaten in a dangerous area of Tulsa, and after leaving the hospital against medical advice, he returned to the streets and ended up living underneath a nearby bridge.
Eventually, the arrests caught up with him. Cale says he spent about eight months in jail across two counties and was expecting that prison might be the next step. Instead, he received an opportunity to enter Veterans Treatment Court and complete a 90-day treatment program.
That changed the direction of his life.
Within a few years, Cale would go from sleeping underneath a bridge to becoming a licensed plumber, starting Maston’s Plumbing & Drain with one truck and very little money, producing roughly $500,000 as a solo operator in his first year and doubling the business repeatedly until it reached approximately $3 million in 2025. By May 2026, another industry podcast described the company as approaching $5 million.
Today, Cale is also experimenting with artificial intelligence inside the business, using the technology to improve operations and reduce repetitive work. The AI is a newer chapter, however. The real transformation started years earlier when he learned how to ask for help, follow people who had already found a way out and apply those same lessons to business.
Addiction Took Him From the Military to the Streets
Cale is a veteran who served in Afghanistan before returning to civilian life. His transition home was difficult, and addiction eventually became severe enough that he lost stable housing and spent significant time on the streets around Tulsa. Maston’s later described his post-service period as one in which he returned with almost nothing and eventually found himself sleeping underneath a bridge before getting into the plumbing trade.
In his own telling, homelessness was not one continuous year in the exact same location. There were periods underneath the bridge and periods spent in what he called trap houses, abandoned or barely habitable buildings that might have no electricity, water or gas. He estimates that he was homeless on and off for at least a year.
The lifestyle revolved around addiction. Cale has explained that once obtaining drugs became the most important objective, decisions that would have seemed irrational before began to feel normal. Family relationships deteriorated as relatives became increasingly unwilling to support behavior that was helping him continue using.
His arrests piled up as well.
When asked how many times police had arrested him, Cale estimated at least 10 and possibly 12. The offenses included theft-related charges, and eventually he accumulated enough legal trouble that he spent roughly eight months incarcerated between two counties.
By that point, he assumed he was headed to prison.
Treatment Gave Him Another Option
Cale says the turning point came when a judge presented him with another path through Veterans Treatment Court.
He had not been planning on rehab. In fact, he has recalled being prepared to simply serve whatever prison sentence came next. The judge challenged him not to throw his life away and gave him the opportunity to enter treatment instead.
Cale eventually completed a 90-day residential program. During recovery, he found himself surrounded by other men who were dealing with similar problems but were farther ahead in the process. That introduced him to a simple strategy that would later become central to the way he approached business: when someone has already reached the place you are trying to reach, pay attention to what they are doing and follow the process.
Recovery did not magically erase his problems, but it gave him structure and a community of people who understood what rebuilding looked like.
Cale later realized that the same principle applied to entrepreneurship.
Instead of believing he had to figure everything out alone, he began seeking out contractors, coaches and business owners who had already built successful companies.
Plumbing Became Part of the Rebuild
The plumbing trade became one of the vehicles through which Cale rebuilt his life.
One account from KickCharge Creative says that after returning from Afghanistan and going through homelessness, Cale worked as a plumbing apprentice for his brother-in-law. He eventually became licensed and worked as a contractor for another local company before deciding that he wanted to build something of his own.
He did not begin with a massive investment.
KickCharge says Cale launched with one truck and about $1,200. Maston’s Plumbing & Drain officially dates its start to 2021, while Cale has described the early operating period as a classic “chuck in a truck” business where he sold the work, performed the work and handled the responsibilities himself.
During the first year, he says the company produced roughly $500,000 in revenue while he was still operating largely as a one-man show.
That was only the beginning.
$500,000 Became $3 Million
Cale told Next Level Pros that Maston’s continued roughly doubling its revenue each year after that first $500,000 year, eventually reaching approximately $3 million in 2025.
The growth was especially notable because the company remained relatively small. At the time of the 2025 interview, Cale described leading a team of about five plumbing crews rather than building a massive organization with dozens of layers of management.
The business focused on residential and commercial plumbing, including water heaters, drain cleaning, sewer work, repiping, fixture installation and water-quality services. Maston’s positioned itself as a veteran-owned and family-owned company centered on traditional customer service, even while increasingly adopting modern technology behind the scenes.
By May 2026, the growth apparently had not stopped. An industry podcast introducing Cale described Maston’s as a nearly $5 million plumbing company only about five years after he had been living on the streets.
That puts the transformation into perspective.
A few years earlier, Cale was asking strangers for money at gas stations.
Now he was building an operation approaching eight figures.
The Business Did Not Grow Because of Fancy Technology
One thing that makes Cale’s story especially useful is that the original rise to $3 million was not built around some sophisticated technology stack.
The 2025 Next Level Pros episode specifically described Maston’s as having grown without huge outside investment, massive crews or an elaborate collection of technology. Instead, Cale focused heavily on sales, mentorship, recruiting, training, branding and creating repeatable processes.
That matters because AI entered the business later.
Cale had already proven that he could generate demand, sell work and develop plumbers before artificial intelligence became part of the operating strategy. When he began experimenting with AI, he was applying it to an existing company with actual workflows and actual problems rather than hoping software would somehow create the company for him.
That is an important distinction for contractors.
Technology works better when it has something solid to improve.
Recovery Taught Him How to Find Mentors
One of the strongest connections Cale makes between recovery and entrepreneurship is the importance of following people who are farther down the road.
During treatment, he encountered men who had been clean longer than he had. Instead of trying to invent his own recovery program, he looked at what those people were doing and tried to do the same things.
Years later, when Cale wanted to grow Maston’s, he used a similar approach.
He attended trade events, developed relationships with other contractors and listened to people who had already built the type of business he wanted. That willingness to accept guidance was very different from the mindset he had during addiction, when much of his life revolved around immediate impulses and survival.
The same personality that once pushed him deeply into destructive behavior could also be redirected.
Cale has said that when he becomes committed to something, he tends to become completely absorbed in it. Recovery taught him that intensity did not necessarily have to disappear; it needed a better target.
Business became one of those targets.
Branding Helped Maston’s Become More Than Another Plumbing Company
As Maston’s grew, Cale realized that technically good plumbing work was not enough to create a memorable company.
The business eventually went through a major rebrand with KickCharge Creative. The new identity leaned heavily into a classic service-company aesthetic and a message around bringing back what Maston’s calls the “golden age of service.”
The strategy was deliberately different from the generic blue-and-red plumbing branding common across the industry. Cale wanted customers to associate Maston’s with reliability, professionalism and the feeling of an old-fashioned company that actually does what it promises.
According to KickCharge's case study, the rebrand was followed by a doubling of revenue compared with the previous year, a 30% year-over-year increase in Google Business Profile interactions and a 303% increase in calls during July through September 2025 compared with the same period in 2024. Those are agency-reported results and should be treated as such, but they illustrate how important brand presentation became during the company's next stage of growth.
The company was becoming more sophisticated externally while Cale was also looking for ways to make it more efficient internally.
That is where AI started to become interesting.
AI Entered the Business as an Operating Tool
In a 2026 Home Service Studs episode, Cale discussed using artificial intelligence to enhance operations at Maston’s rather than treating AI only as a tool for writing marketing content. The conversation focused on using technology alongside recruiting, training and process improvement to build a more sustainable company.
That approach fits the stage of business Cale had reached.
A one-person plumbing company can run largely from the owner's memory because the owner is involved in almost every job. Once multiple technicians, customer-service employees and salespeople are involved, the amount of information moving through the business grows quickly.
Calls need to be answered.
Appointments need to be booked.
Technicians need information.
Customers need updates.
Unsold work needs follow-up.
Managers need to understand what is happening without chasing employees for every answer.
AI becomes useful when it removes friction from those repeated activities.
AI Can Help the Office Without Replacing the Plumber
Plumbing is a good example of where the limits of AI are obvious.
Artificial intelligence cannot crawl underneath a house and replace a sewer line. It cannot repair a broken water heater or diagnose every complicated plumbing issue remotely.
The physical work still requires trained technicians.
Where AI becomes more powerful is everything surrounding the technician.
It can help summarize customer conversations, create follow-up messages, organize internal information, generate training materials, analyze call recordings and reduce some of the administrative work required to keep customers moving through the company.
That can become especially valuable as a contractor grows.
The objective is not necessarily to eliminate employees.
It is to help good employees handle more work without requiring the company to add administrative headcount every time revenue increases.
The Trades Gave Cale Something Bigger Than Revenue
Cale's connection to plumbing is also more personal than the financial results suggest.
By 2026, he was talking about building Maston’s into a place where young men who felt that they had few options could find a career and some of the same structure that the trades had provided for him.
That makes recruiting and training more than simply a growth strategy.
Cale knows what it feels like to believe that the next stage of life may be jail or prison. He also knows what it feels like when someone presents another path.
The trades became part of that path for him.
Now he wants the company to provide opportunities for other people who may not have a traditional college background or a perfectly clean personal history but are willing to learn and work.
That purpose can become a competitive advantage as well. Home-service companies across the country struggle to recruit skilled technicians, and businesses that can develop people internally may have an advantage over companies constantly trying to hire experienced plumbers away from competitors.
A $3 Million Company Still Has to Learn How to Scale
Reaching $3 million does not mean the difficult part is over.
In some ways, this is where contracting businesses become harder to manage because the owner can no longer personally control every customer interaction while still being heavily involved in daily decisions.
The skills required to go from zero to $500,000 are not necessarily the skills required to go from $3 million toward $5 million or $10 million.
At the beginning, an owner can compensate for missing systems with effort.
They can answer the phone themselves, sell the job, perform the work and make sure the customer is happy.
That approach eventually stops working.
The company has to replace individual effort with people, processes and technology that can produce similar results without the owner touching every job.
Cale's increasing interest in AI appears to fit that transition.
The Marketing Lesson Is About What Happens After the Lead
There is also an important lesson for contractors running Google Ads or any other paid lead-generation strategy.
Getting the homeowner to call is only the beginning.
If a plumbing company spends thousands of dollars generating leads but fails to answer calls, takes hours to respond or never follows up with estimates, the problem is not necessarily the advertising.
The problem may be what happens after the advertising works.
That is one reason AI can become valuable alongside Google Ads. Contractors can use AI to help research homeowner searches, write and test advertisements, improve landing pages and support follow-up after leads arrive.
That is also the idea behind our Google Ads & AI Masterclass for Home Improvement Contractors. The goal is to teach contractors how to use AI throughout the customer-acquisition system rather than simply asking ChatGPT to write an ad and hoping it produces results.
A good campaign creates opportunities.
A good system converts them.
You need both.
Cale's Numbers Should Be Viewed in Context
The $3 million revenue figure comes directly from Cale's November 2025 conversation with Next Level Pros, where he said the company expected to produce approximately $3 million that year after starting around $500,000 and doubling repeatedly.
The later nearly $5 million number comes from a May 2026 podcast description rather than audited financial statements, so it should be described as a company or podcast-reported figure rather than independent financial verification.
That distinction is worth making because the story does not need inflated numbers.
Going from homelessness to building a $3 million plumbing company is already extraordinary.
If the business was indeed approaching $5 million only months later, it simply shows that the growth continued.
What Contractors Can Learn From Cale Forester
The most obvious lesson in Cale's story is resilience, but there are more practical business lessons underneath it.
First, asking for help can be a competitive advantage. Cale learned in recovery that people who have already solved a problem can often shorten the path for someone who is willing to listen. He carried that philosophy into business by seeking mentors and experienced operators rather than pretending he needed to know everything himself.
Second, the trades can provide an extraordinary path for people who are willing to develop a valuable skill. Cale went from homelessness to becoming a licensed plumbing contractor and then used that skill as the foundation for entrepreneurship.
Third, brand matters even in a technical service business. Maston’s growth accelerated as the company became more deliberate about how customers perceived the business, not simply how well its plumbers performed the work.
Finally, technology is most useful when it supports a real process. AI can help Cale's team communicate, train and operate more efficiently because Maston’s is already a functioning company with established customers and employees.
AI is not the business.
It is leverage for the business.
From Living Under a Bridge to Building a Multimillion-Dollar Plumbing Company
Cale Forester's story would sound unrealistic if he had not told so much of it publicly himself.
He went from serving in Afghanistan to battling drug addiction, spending roughly a year on and off the streets and being arrested at least 10 to 12 times. He lived underneath a bridge in Tulsa, spent around eight months in jail and reached a point where he believed prison might simply be what came next.
Instead, treatment gave him another opportunity.
Cale entered recovery, learned the plumbing trade, became licensed and eventually started Maston’s Plumbing & Drain with one truck and limited resources. He says the company produced around $500,000 in its first year, doubled repeatedly and reached approximately $3 million in 2025. A later 2026 industry interview described it as approaching $5 million.
Now Cale is using artificial intelligence as one more tool to help the business mature, improve operations and prepare for the next stage of growth.
But the technology is not the most remarkable part of the story.
A few years before Cale was thinking about AI, recruiting technicians or building a multimillion-dollar company, he was thinking about where he would sleep and how he would make it through another day.
Plumbing gave him a trade.
Recovery gave him another chance.
Business gave him something to build.
Now he is trying to use all three to create opportunities for the people who come after him.
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