He came to eastern Idaho in search of a new lifestyle and now owns a thriving excavation company
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IDAHO FALLS – Joshua Dybka was high atop a San Diego skyrise when he knew his life needed to change.
It was April 2018 and the 40-year-old crane operator was making $250,000 a year. It was his 75th hour of work that week and his wife sent him a text with a video of his daughter’s ballet recital.
“My heart broke in that moment,” Dybka tells EastIdahoNews.com. “I knew I’d be doing the same thing 10 years from now (having missed every little league game and ballet recital) and something inside of me snapped.”
So, he walked away from the lucrative union position and with the full support of his wife, cashed in on his pension and began looking for a new way of life in a place with traditional family values.
That June, he and his family packed up an RV and set out on a road trip that brought him to Idaho. When he arrived in Idaho Falls, there was something about it that struck him.
“I turned to my wife and said, ‘There’s something going on here.’ I felt something (that made me want to stay),” Dybka says.
His trip ended up taking him through northern Idaho into Coeur d’Alene and when he got back home, he remembered what he felt during his stay in Idaho Falls.
Settling down in Idaho Falls
The following year, he and his family decided to move and Idaho Falls is the place they wanted to call home. They built a small home in a quiet neighborhood and Dybka was looking forward to settling down and living a slower lifestyle.
It wasn’t long before he noticed what he describes as “a lack of skilled labor” in the area.
“Finding skilled labor that shows up when they say they’re going to show up and does what they say they’re going to do is hard to find in these parts,” Dybka says. “I’ve been a crane operator for 25 years … so I can run everything from a bobcat to an excavator to a bulldozer. I came here and found a niche.”
He opened D.I.R.T. Excavation in 2020, which caters primarily to homeowners. He posted an ad on Facebook and it quickly took off.
“The following day I went out and sold five jobs,” Dybka says. “That was literally how the business was born. It was (completely by) accident, literally a gift from the man upstairs.”
Dybka runs the business out of his home, and the bulk of the work is for “one-and-done” customers. He serves roughly 60 clients a year. Since the launch, Dybka says the most-requested project from customers are RV pads.
Dybka admits he could work more and make a lot more money, but that would defeat the purpose of moving to eastern Idaho in the first place. He also enjoys giving customers a personal experience that he says you can’t get from a business with a lot of employees. He frequently turns projects down to stay true to his goals.
“There was a point when I was starting to get (a lot of work). My wife was like, ‘Wait a minute. You retired from running cranes and we moved here and now you’re starting to do the same thing you were doing (in San Diego). Don’t work 13 hours a day, six days a week. That’s not what life is about,'” Dybka recalls.
Still, Dybka says he’s “bursting at the seams” with all the work he does have and is looking to move to a larger place in Rigby or Ririe once the housing price bubble settles down.
‘God’s fingerprints are all over this’
After two years, Dybka is running a successful business and raising his family in a community he fell in love with when he first drove through four years ago. Despite not having any family ties to the area, he says he and his wife have acquired many friends and they’re happier than they’ve ever been.
And he’s not the only successful entrepreneur in the family. His wife, Brooke, is a military vet and is a licensed marriage and family therapist at Dybka Behavioral Health.
During our conversation, Dybka frequently spoke of God and his Lutheran faith when talking about his journey. When he looks back on how he got here, he says “God’s fingerprints are all over this.”
He can hardly believe it in retrospect but he’s grateful for how it turned out.
“This wasn’t part of the plan. I have this joke that goes, ‘If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans,'” Joshua says, laughing. “God threw it in my lap … and now here we are two years later. I wake up every day and say, ‘Ok Lord, you tell me what I’m doing today.”
But through it all, he hasn’t forgotten his real purpose in coming here and what’s most important to him and his wife.
“What’s (more) important than any of this that we’re talking about is little league games … and dance recitals,” he says.
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