ENTREPRENEURIAL SPIRIT
Prison is filled with hustlers, many of whom are still hustling. Most prison jobs pay slave wages and guys supplement their incomes by providing all manner of services to their fellow residents: doing laundry, ironing, altering clothes, cooking, running football pools, smuggling extra food out of the kitchen, cleaning cells, smuggling contraband, carrying heavy commissary bags, washing dishes, organizing lockers, selling phone minutes, typing, writing letters, doing legal work, making beds, cutting hair, and more. If you are willing to pay, you can get someone to do darn near anything you want.
Running a prison business is prohibited by BOP policy, but as long as a hustler doesn’t cross the line into hard contraband (cell phones, drugs, booze, weapons) or gambling, the staff typically look the other way. Behind all this hustling, on the streets and in prison, is something of great value when directed to positive, legal ends–entrepreneurial spirit. The BOP would do well to do more than turn a blind eye to the hustlers and their hustling. Intentionally redirecting that spirit could increase the likelihood of success for returning citizens. I saw the potential first-hand when I taught Business 101: How to Create a Business Plan at the camp at Thomson.
Almost all of my 22 years in business and brand management was spent working alongside serial entrepreneurs. My job was typically to build teams and create operational structures that could handle the development and go-to-market execution of the near-constant flow of ideas for new consumer products that my bosses envisioned. In laymen’s terms, they were good at starting fires, I was good and tending them. I was the method to their madness.
I wrote new business plans as well as annual sales, marketing, and operations plans for our existing businesses, including financial projections and performance metrics. And because of our stature in the marketplace, the entrepreneurs I worked with had many other start-up business plans pitched to them, which I would help to vet. I jumped at the opportunity to put this experience to use in service of my fellow campers.
When I posted the sign-up for the class, I was surprised by how quickly the ten slots filled up, and how diverse the participants were. Our group had bankers and drug dealers and men from various backgrounds in between. They all had one thing in common though–every one of them had an idea for a business they wanted to start upon release. Like the men themselves, there was great variety in the ideas, including: a mobile pet grooming service; a branded chrome polish for cars and motorcycles; an inventors’ incubator; a trucking company focused on employing formerly incarcerated people; a real estate investment coaching service; a vending machine management service; a smoke shop chain, and others.
By prison standards the end of the 10-week class was demanding. We met for 60-90 minutes every week, and in between classes there was quite a bit of homework which was made more cumbersome because we were not allowed access to computers with word processing and spreadsheet software. We worked from a plan framework provided by the SCORE small business mentorship organization.
We built our plans from the ground up one section at a time, defining product/service details, analyzing the target market and competitors, creating financial projections, and preparing elevator pitches. Students had to present their work to the class and received on-the-fly feedback. The diversity of perspectives made the conversations lively and substantive.
At the end of ten weeks, the budding entrepreneurs did not have a business plan that would satisfy a potential investor or bank loan officer, but they did have a foundation from which they could refine quickly toward just such a sales pitch. Leading them through the process was tremendously satisfying for me and I was grateful to make that contribution.
As was customary at the end of large projects in the companies I ran, I conducted a post-mortem on the final day of class to gather feedback on my delivery of the material and the class experience. The participants surprised me by agreeing that they would have liked to spend even more time on the class, adding a second night per week, outside tutoring, and “hot seat” sessions to dig into the details of their plans more rigorously. They were motivated and committed, just like real entrepreneurs need to be. They enbodied the old saying, “Entrepreneurship is living for several years the way most people won’t so that you can live the rest of your life the way most people can’t.”
Before reporting to prison, I started a business called Golf Geeks Consulting that was a creative services collective in the golf segment of the private clubs and resorts industry. For my first project, I created a course history book and associated digital assets for a club in New York with my collaborators. Teaching the Business 101 class reconnected me with that vision and I intend to pursue additional projects, as well as the expansion of my website GeekedOnGolf.com, when I get home.
There are signs of more welcoming attitudes toward formerly incarcerated people in the marketplace, but our society still has quite a way to go to remove barriers to successful careers upon re-entry. Preparing men and women who have the entrepreneurial spirit with classes like Business 101 is a step in the right direction. The BOP could and should go much farther though, especially with minimum risk people in the camps. Associates degree programs in partnership with community colleges and entrepreneurship work-release opportunities with small businesses could provide participants with the experience of what it will take to make their business ideas viable entities.
If there is one thing I’ve learned in prison, it’s that hustlers gonna hustle. It is in everyone’s interests that that entrepreneurial spirit be cultivated and actively guided onto the straight and narrow path of success.
