How Joshua Therrian Turned Tragedy Into Triumph: Motivation, Wealth & Giving Back

Some guests arrive on the Hustle Zone with a business pitch. Joshua Therrian arrived with a testimony.

Host Ryan Perez opened this episode of Hustle Zone — his ongoing series about “the story leading up to the glory” — by promising that Joshua’s story would look familiar to anyone who thinks a hard childhood disqualifies them from becoming an entrepreneur. What followed was one of the more unguarded conversations the show has aired.

Losing both parents to addiction

Joshua was a year and a half old when his father died of a heroin overdose. He never got to know him. Growing up, money and stability were scarce, and so was confidence — he recalls being told in third grade that he smelled bad, the result of not having consistent hygiene at home while his mother struggled with substance abuse of her own.

The turning point came at age 9, when his aunt and uncle took him in. He credits them — especially his aunt, who later homeschooled him starting in seventh grade and battled a serious heart condition of her own — with showing him what love and faith looked like for the first time. He calls them “some of my heroes.”

Joshua went on to Fitchburg State University, where he studied exercise science with a business minor and pitched for the college baseball team. Then, at 19, while he was still in college, he got the call that his mother had also died of a heroin overdose — six years ago this past January, just days before this conversation was recorded. He describes the period afterward not as depression but as a steady, quiet mourning, one he says his faith carried him through. His life motto, he says, is Romans 8:28 — the belief that everything in his past, however painful, is being worked toward something good.

Building a family fast

That same year, Joshua met the woman who would become his wife — his high school sweetheart, even though he was already in college. Not long before their wedding, the couple took in his two nieces, an unplanned and, in his words, hard-to-put-into-words turning point that made them parents before they were even married. They married in June 2014; Joshua became an insurance sales agent that July; they bought their first house that October. A third child, a boy named JoJo, joined the family in March 2015.

From there, Joshua and his wife built a real estate investment business — buying, rehabbing, and renting properties for passive income. In June 2016, frustrated by how slow early real estate income can be, he decided not to wait for success to start living his purpose. That decision became Make A Change Inc, a nonprofit built around meaningful memories, education, and faith-based and financial education for kids who’ve been through circumstances like his own. The organization runs a domestic arm supporting kids in foster care and tough home situations in the U.S. and Canada, and Joshua described plans for an international “orphan committee” focused on mission trips and orphanage-building in Kenya.

“Luck is the last thing”

Asked how he’d respond to people who chalk his success up to luck or privilege, Joshua didn’t hesitate: “Luck is the last thing that allowed everything that happened in my life to happen. What it was, was hard work and determination, period.” He described working roughly 80 hours a week as a college student — while also carrying a full course load and preparing to get married — and said that pace has essentially continued ever since, with current weeks running 80 to 100 hours between his income-generating work, running the nonprofit, and building long-term wealth through real estate.

He also talked about his book, which walks readers through doubling their income, with a favorite chapter devoted entirely to identifying your “why.” For Joshua, that why is explicit: faith, family, and Make A Change. Money, he argues, isn’t the problem — “loving money is what’s evil,” he said — and he frames financial freedom as resting on four pillars: faith, family, health, and money, meant to fund generational stability rather than personal indulgence alone.

Outside of the hustle, Joshua kept it simple: baseball, Sunday NFL (he’s a Tom Brady fan), and church. He picked Pepsi over Coke and Michael Jackson over Prince — and admitted that, fun aside, most of his waking hours still go toward the same mission that got him here.