J oe Strada is getting his picture taken and his employees are giving him a hard time about it. Professional photos are apparently not a common occurrence around the Strada Services warehouse in Sanford, Florida. Giving the boss a hard time is. The building is long and low, mostly concrete and metal, with loading doors punched into its sides and a wide slab of pavement out front. Company vans litter the lot.

Inside, Strada is staring at a container of wire scraps, cut lengths tossed together until the pile looks like a snake pit. Strada wonders aloud whether anyone checked what they already had before buying more. Copper wire isn’t cheap.

“I don’t have a job, but I walk around and I ask a lot of questions,” Strada says. “Like, why are we doing this?”

Strada, 63, no longer runs the business day to day. A CEO does that. Strada Services installs and services electrical, air-conditioning, plumbing and security systems for homebuilders and homeowners. The company had $534 million in revenue in 2025 and has more than 4,000 employees across 13 states. Strada is executive chairman and owns 45% of the business. Forbes estimates his net worth at $800 million. While new-home construction remains well below its pandemic boom, a rebound in homebuilding would likely propel Strada into the ranks of self-made billionaires.

Last month, Strada won the Republican nomination in Florida’s 11th Congressional District after a machine recount confirmed a 393-vote lead . The district runs from Orlando’s western suburbs through Lake County to Sumter County and includes The Villages , Florida’s sprawling 145,000 resident retirement kingdom. Under new boundaries adopted this year, Donald Trump would have carried it 57% to 42% in 2024. So far Strada has personally injected $5 million into his campaign versus the $120,000 raised by his Democratic opponent.

If Strada wins in November, which barring a historic upset seems more likely than not, Forbes estimates he would likely become the wealthiest member of the U.S. Congress, ahead of Indiana Representative Jefferson Shreve, who built self storage operator Storage Express and sold it in a $590 million deal in 2022, and Florida Senator Rick Scott, who made his fortune building the hospital company that became Columbia/HCA.

S trada grew up in Chicago with four sisters and a brother. His mother stayed home with the six kids while his father bounced among jobs and small businesses. When Strada was 12, his father had enough of Chicago winters and moved the family to Longwood, Florida, just north of Orlando. Bowling was already part of family life. His father had organized a Sunday league with relatives in Chicago, and in high school Strada joined a local league and helped run it. The manager of the bowling alley noticed him and hired him during a tournament to push a cart around and collect empty beer bottles. Strada did well enough to get a full-time job. College never really came up.

Strada met Karen, his future wife, at 18 while cashing a paycheck at a Barnett Bank drive-through. She was the teller. Strada came back the next Friday and passed her a note asking for her phone number.

By 19, he knew the bowling alley inside and out and could see the owner was struggling. Strada wondered if he could buy the place but had no way to finance it. Instead, he put $20,000 into a donut shop with his father while keeping the bowling job. Before long he was baking donuts six nights a week, working at the alley during the day and sleeping three hours a night. Karen still has a picture from then in which, Strada says, he has black raccoon rings around his eyes. They married in October 1984, when he was 21, skipped a honeymoon and put $21,000 down on their first house in Altamonte Springs, a town 15 minutes north of Orlando.

Around then, the bowling alley started bouncing his paychecks. A friend, Robert Dello Russo, who had started Del-Air, a Florida air-conditioning contractor, offered Strada a sales job for about half as much money. Strada took it, then started going out with experienced crews for free because he didn’t want to sell work he didn’t understand. He learned to install and service air conditioners and spent Saturdays wiring houses with a Del-Air electrician he trusted.

Strada stayed at Del-Air for years and thought he might someday buy it. That didn’t happen. When Dello Russo decided to sell most of the company to employees instead, Strada proposed that he and Dello Russo start a new separate electrical business together. They did and in 2003 Strada Services was born. For the next 13 years, Strada kept his sales job at Del-Air while building his new electrical company alongside it. The electrical operation remained a distant second to Del-Air’s air-conditioning business, but Strada says it had a few hundred employees and more than $40 million in annual revenue by 2016. In 2016, Strada bought out partner Dello Russo’s stake and left Del-Air to run Strada Services himself.

As part of the 2016 deal, Strada agreed not to compete with Del-Air in air conditioning for five years. When the restriction expired in 2021, he says the head of homebuilder Lennar’s Orlando division offered him HVAC work on about 3,000 homes even though Strada had no HVAC employees. He took it. Within 12 to 18 months, he says, the new division had done roughly $120 million in air-conditioning work.

Strada also had good timing. Private equity was piling into home services, attracted to a fragmented industry full of small HVAC, plumbing and electrical contractors that could be stitched together. Deals involving heating, ventilation, air conditioning and refrigeration services hit a record 240 in 2021, more than double the number two years earlier. Central Florida gave Strada another tailwind. Builders in the Orlando metro area received permits for 17,600 single-family homes in 2021, nearly four times as many as a decade earlier.

That same year, private-equity firm Trilantic North America ($5.9 billion of assets under management) invested in Strada Services taking a 55% stake in the company. Strada declined to provide financial details for the investment. Acquisitions followed as the company expanded beyond Florida, including the 2024 purchase of Texas-based Templar Electric for $80 million , according to Florida Voice. Templar operated in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Oklahoma and Louisiana.

One model from homebuilder D.R. Horton, called the Cali , shows how Strada thinks about the business. His company wired the same floor plan a thousand times in one year. If you build the same house over and over, he figured, you ought to know exactly what goes into it, down to the wire nut. That wasn’t how electricians typically worked. Veterans had their own way of wiring a house and saw that individual touch as part of their craft. Strada standardized the job instead, using a laminated 11-by-17-inch floor plan with color-coded electrical runs that turned the work into a connect-the-dots exercise. It helped speed up the wiring of a house, control materials, cut waste and make costs more predictable. He still keeps a copy in his car.

Growth created another problem. Builders could hand Strada thousands of houses, but somebody still had to show up and do the work. He remembers arriving at the Sanford warehouse one morning and talking to six electricians as they loaded their trucks. All six lived in Kissimmee, which is roughly one hour south. Each was driving to Sanford for materials and then turning around and heading back toward their job sites.

Strada opened a branch near them in Kissimmee. The six workers got part of their day back, and another 10 or 15 people who had wanted to work for Strada but refused the 50 mile Sanford commute suddenly applied. “If the donut shop doesn’t have donuts on the shelf,” he says, “you don’t sell any donuts.”

A t Strada Services, a beginner can enter a 17-week training program without knowing how to wire a house and get paid, with benefits, from the first day. By week 12, Strada says, trainees can take a company vehicle home. He likes that moment, when a young worker who may have been sharing one car with a spouse suddenly pulls into the driveway in a Strada van.

The program grew out of necessity. “We could have doubled our business if we had the workforce,” says Strada. Once Strada learned to train its own workers, that shortage became an advantage. National homebuilders began asking the company to follow them into new markets because, as Strada puts it, they “make their own electricians.”

All three of Strada’s sons eventually joined the family business. Daniel, his youngest, had first wanted to work in fitness. When he joined Strada Services, he started in installation and caught on quickly. That gave Daniel an idea. If the company could teach him the trade, it could teach other people from scratch. Daniel went on to run the training program.

The program is now called Daniel Strada University, in his honor.

Daniel was 28 when he was killed in 2018, an innocent bystander struck by a stray bullet fired during a gunfight outside a shopping center in Lake Mary. Investigators said the bullet came from several hundred feet away. Joe Strada still wears the chain Daniel was wearing when he died.

Strada tells a story about going to Lowe’s with Daniel while they were remodeling a house. As they loaded Daniel’s truck, Strada noticed two bags of concrete they hadn’t paid for. Daniel looked at him. Joe Strada went back inside, told the manager what had happened and paid for the bags. When his father came back out, Daniel was smiling. Joe Strada still thinks about that look when he makes decisions.

“I want to make him proud of me,” says Strada.

O ne political issue that Strada is passionate about is regulation–specifically excessive regulation.

One example he gives is tighter energy codes for new homes. Since 2017, Florida has required builders to test new houses for air leaks. A technician fits a large fan into an outside doorway, pulls air out of the house and measures how much air slips back in through gaps around walls, windows and doors. Strada argues the rule has pushed builders too far in the other direction, because, of course, no one wants to live in a stuffy house. Homes that test especially tight need a fan system to pull fresh air inside because not enough can seep in on its own. He says builders can spend $10,000 to $15,000 sealing a house, only to spend another $5,000 letting outside air back in.

“So we did nothing but put the home back to where it used to be, but we added $20,000 to the sale price,” he says.

Strada has also made congressional stock trading part of his anti-corruption pitch. His campaign calls for investigations of suspicious trades and penalties for lawmakers who use privileged information for personal gain. He says Congress shouldn’t be a career either, though when asked how many terms he would personally serve, he doesn’t give a number. He hasn’t served a day yet, he says, and wants to see what he can accomplish first.

“I’m not going there to get rich,” Strada says. “I’ve already worked and got rich.”

What he does expect is frustration. At Strada Services, he can walk through a warehouse, spot a pile of unused wire and ask whether anybody checked what they already had. If he owes somebody a call, he says, he makes it before he loses sleep. Employees have a name for the fast pace he has set. They call it “Strada speed.”

Congress, Strada knows, will be different.

“They’re not going to move as fast as I am.”