There are people who would take an unusually warm winter day like Friday for granted, but after spending nearly six months in jail Anthony Fanning is not one of them.
Prepping to paint a deck on Ashland City home the 33-year-old's future was shining bright but he has pulled himself out of some of the darkest, places.
"I was just in possession of marijuana and guns at the time. I let a lot of people down," the father of six said.
It wasn't until he was sentence to six months behind bars that Anthony decided he needed to change.
"Just hearing the time I could be away from my kids that was the moment," he recalled.
He vowed to his kids and wife to change his life but with a felony on his record it was promise he found hard to keep. No one would hire a convicted felon.
"t is so tough to find a job, you can have a misdemeanor on your record let alone a felony and it's real tough, it's real tough," Anthony said.
Anthony though, eventually found his way to Goodwill where a six-week Construction Training Program set him on course to become his own boss.
"He's a go getter," said Tim Kahn who helps train people like Anthony.
"If I can instill in them the attitude of 'I can do this,' then that's what's going to take them somewhere," Tim added.
As a convicted felon Anthony couldn't find a company that would hire him, so with his training he started his own. At the beginning of February the company he founded, Imperial Home Repair Services LLC celebrated its first anniversary.
"It changed my life, it changed my life. It made me put everything in my life in perspective," he remarked.
Eventually his goal was to help hire other people with similar backgrounds, a conviction and stigma he hoped to overturn.
