Firefighting is a risky profession, but it can be a great risk-mitigation strategy for entrepreneurs. “That’s the beauty of fire service,” says Chad Ketron, firefighter and co-owner of Fort Myers-based Ricky Rescue Fire Training Academy. “As long as you’re living within your means, being a firefighter should pay all your bills. If you want to make more money and take a risk with starting your own business, you can do that.” As an added bonus, the firefighter’s work schedule—24 hours on, 48 hours off—creates time and space to work on side projects. That helped Ketron and fellow firefighter Jeromy VanderMeulen launch Ricky Rescue in 2009.

Though the leap to entrepreneurship can look daunting, both men were exposed to entrepreneurship early. Their families ran businesses in the trades—a cleaning business, a septic business, a fill dirt, sod and grading business. “My dad used to say, ‘You can either work for the man or be the man,’” Ketron says. “So, Jeromy and I did a hybrid thing. We have good careers with a retirement, and we also branched out to the entrepreneurship side.”

The pair started Ricky Rescue in the middle of the Great Recession, when many local firefighters were being laid off. They began by offering resume-building classes for free to their fellow firefighters, and by 2010 they were booking a steady stream of classes. That’s when they decided to make Ricky Rescue a formal business, and the company grew organically from there. “The intent wasn’t even to start a business,” Ketron says. “The point was to help out the people we knew.”

In the last 15 years, the pair has learned a lot about entrepreneurship. They share their top two tips with us.

Find Your Niche

Ketron and VanderMeulen consider themselves the forefathers of online learning for the fire service. When they launched Ricky Rescue in 2009, the majority of fire training programs were held in person—and not always locally. “In order to move up through the ranks in the fire service, you have to have certain levels of education,” VanderMeulen explains. “To get to Fire Officer 1, I had to wait until an in-person course became available. Then I had to travel to Ocala for a week. That’s a big deal, to take a week off work and then pay for room and board in another city.”

If people could take classes online and at their own pace, both men realized, that would open a world of opportunities for both their fellow firefighters and their business. “That’s how we knew we’d found our niche,” Ketron says.

Find Your Passion

Ricky Rescue wasn’t the first business for Ketron or VanderMeulen, but it has been the most successful. Before starting the academy, both men took advantage of the safety net offered by fire service to try their hand at entrepreneurship. But none of their other projects seemed as urgent or important as Ricky Rescue. The difference between those businesses and this one? Passion, according to both men. “If you’re going to work every day, you might as well love it,” Ketron says.