Feature | By Jocklyn Mundy | Photos by Michael Kleinfelt • Windermere Photography
Near the first responders' memorial in Windermere, there is a newly placed bench, part of the town's Centennial celebration. It bears the Ferst family name and a simple declaration, but its final phrase is deliberately left unfinished, open for whoever sits there to complete. For Joe and Amanda Ferst, that open ending is the whole point. But before that bench existed, their story began over a thousand miles north.
Years of Near-Misses
Joe spent his summers at the family’s cabin in the Pocono Mountains. Amanda called the Pocono Mountains home. His family’s getaway and her childhood home sat less than a mile apart, close enough that they probably crossed paths a hundred times without ever knowing it. It would take a college party outside Philadelphia, and a pair of Nextel walkie-talkie phones, to finally close the distance.
It was 2006 at West Chester University, just outside Philadelphia. Joe was a junior when a mutual friend introduced him to Amanda at a fraternity party. Joe remembers it vividly. “I remember walking down the steps and thinking, she’s going to be one of my best friends,” Joe says, still amused by the certainty of that moment. “I just knew.”
The relationship grew steadily from there, helped along by the easy back-and-forth of their Nextel walkie-talkie phones, that familiar chirp, making it effortless to stay connected.
Both came from close-knit families. Joe was raised outside Philadelphia near Valley Forge, and Amanda was in the Pocono Mountains, with Italian and Irish roots on both sides, traditions passed down like heirlooms. The revelation that Joe’s family cabin had sat less than a mile from Amanda’s childhood home only deepened the sense that their paths had been quietly converging long before they met.
The relationship became official after Joe met Amanda’s family at her grandmother’s 80th birthday in New York. Family approval wasn’t a formality; it was a foundation.
A Natural Move South
After college, they married in Jupiter, Florida, a state already woven into both their families’ histories. Joe’s grandfather had built a construction and development legacy that extended into South Florida. Amanda’s family had long vacationed along the Gulf Coast. When the opportunity for Joe and Amanda to move to Florida presented itself, it felt like a natural progression.
Joe moved first, joining the family construction business and drawing on years spent absorbing the rhythms of job sites and development work. Amanda, who had already been teaching in Pennsylvania, stayed back to finish out her school year before joining him a few months later. Once in South Florida, she continued teaching special-needs students, first in preschool and later in elementary autism programs.
“I loved it,” she says. “It’s not just teaching academics. You’re teaching life skills. You’re advocating constantly. And you celebrate the smallest milestones, because sometimes those are the biggest victories.”
It wasn’t long before Joe recognized that, while he respected the construction business, his strengths lay elsewhere. He transitioned into business-to-business internet sales and was soon introduced to the CEO of Hotwire Communications, a Philadelphia-founded internet provider with ambitions to match his own. He joined the company in 2013 and began building a leadership career with the kind of steady, purposeful momentum that would come to define him. Over time, his role expanded from sales development to overseeing teams, revitalizing underperforming markets, and guiding large-scale infrastructure expansion across Florida.
“I love going into something that isn’t working and figuring out how to make it work,” he says. “It starts with people. It always does.”
Everything at Once
If there is a recurring theme in the Ferst story, it is this: they rarely do one thing at a time.
Their daughter Harper Conchetta arrived in 2015, her middle name drawn from Amanda’s grandmother. Within months of her arrival, Joe and Amanda moved out to acreage in Loxahatchee, living in a single finished room with a newborn while they renovated the home around them. They had barely caught their breath when they discovered they were expecting again. Their son, Joseph Vincent Ferst II, JoJo, as everyone knows him, arrived 15 months after his sister, named for Joe’s grandfather. Then came daughter, Lennon James, their youngest, James, for Amanda’s father, a man who raised only daughters and received a namesake he never expected.
Their children's names pay tribute to family, a thread of gratitude woven through a life steadily moving forward.
Amanda continued teaching through those early years of motherhood, balancing the classroom with a growing family. As her children grew, she began to feel the pull in two directions.
“When our second turned one, I knew I needed to be home,” she says. “Teaching requires patience and heart. So does parenting. I had to choose.”
By then, they had renovated and fully settled into their Loxahatchee property, land they loved, a home they had shaped with their own hands. It felt, for a time, like the place they had been building toward. Then Joe’s expanding responsibilities at Hotwire began requiring a presence closer to the company’s Fort Lauderdale headquarters, and the daily commute became unsustainable.
“We thought we had found our forever home,” Amanda reflects. “We loved the land. We had just finished renovating. But Joe’s schedule wasn’t sustainable.”
Their search led them to Cooper City, a tight-knit community just outside Fort Lauderdale, known for strong schools and neighbors who actually know each other, placed Joe within twenty minutes of the office. The move opened the door to what would become one of his most defining professional seasons: rebuilding and developing the South Florida market, transforming what had been the company’s lowest-performing region into its highest-producing in the nation.
“It’s not just strategy, it’s culture,” Joe says. “You have to connect with people first.”
Finding Windermere
As Hotwire’s Central Florida expansion accelerated, what had started as a professional conversation gradually became a personal one. Joe began commuting north, building a team and a culture in a new market, staying longer with each visit.
When the time came to consider relocating, they drove through Windermere on a search that had taken them across several communities. Something shifted immediately. The canopied roads, the lake breeze, it held the rhythm of a small town even as Central Florida continued its relentless expansion around it.
But this move was different from the ones before. The children were older now, old enough to have real friendships in Cooper City, familiar faces on every street, a community they had grown into and genuinely loved. Joe and Amanda weren’t going to simply tell them it was time to go. They wanted the kids to feel Windermere before they were ever asked to choose it. So rather than rush, they decided to rent first, settling into a lakefront home on Lake Down, and they were careful about how they made the introduction.
On one of their earliest visits to the rental, they brought the children at night, timing their arrival so the kids would walk in to fireworks reflecting across the water.
“It felt magical,” Amanda recalls. “The kids were in awe.”
Lake days followed. Dock jumps and new friendships formed naturally. What had been designed as a gentle introduction became something the children claimed as their own. A year and a half later, in 2023, the Fersts purchased what they now describe, without hesitation, as their “we’re not moving again” house, off Park Avenue. “We were welcomed with open arms,” Joe says. “That matters.”
Roots
From the moment they arrived, the Fersts committed themselves to the community they had chosen. Joe serves on numerous boards throughout Windermere and the broader Central Florida region, bringing the same focused energy to civic life that has defined his professional career. That leadership was recognized in 2025 when he was named to the Orlando Business Journal's prestigious 40 Under 40, one of the region's most respected honors, reflecting someone who has invested as much in his community as in his career. Amanda volunteers regularly at Windermere Elementary, where all three children attend, with the same quiet dedication she once brought to her special-needs classrooms. For the Fersts, Windermere was never just a place to land. It was a place to belong to.
Harper, now in fourth grade; JoJo, in third; and Lennon, in kindergarten. Evenings and weekends revolve around travel soccer, flag football, and private training sessions. Life at the Ferst household has not slowed.
Family has always come first for Joe and Amanda. So when the opportunity arose to purchase six acres in Polk County, it was less a departure than a natural extension of who they are. What began as a simple family retreat has slowly taken shape as a hands-on learning ground for the children. They cleared the land. They added beehives. It is slow, patient, living work: no immediate harvest, no finished product, just the steady lesson of stewardship unfolding in real time.
It is the same instinct that led them, during Windermere's Centennial celebrations, to place a bench near the first responders' memorial, a location that carries personal meaning. Amanda's uncle served as a first responder on September 11th. He was off that day, a doctor's appointment that kept him away, and came in as soon as he could, becoming part of the long and grueling work of recovery that followed. Honoring that service, in a town that values its own first responders, felt right.
The plaque on their Centennial Bench bears the family name, the three children's names, and a line chosen with care: I Am Brave • Kind • Loved. And then, intentionally, it ends with one final open phrase: I Am… Every morning, the Ferst family says their "I Am" together, a daily ritual that reminds Harper, JoJo, and Lennon that who they are is always theirs to define: grateful, strong, joyful, unstoppable, whatever the moment calls for. That unfinished line is the point. And now it belongs not just to the Ferst family, but to a town that is grateful to call them neighbors.
