There are three scenarios you may face: hiring someone with an active or recent drug/alcohol problem, realizing one of your employees has a problem, or finding out someone has a gnarly past.

If someone is in active addiction/alcoholism or early in their recovery journey, we don’t hire them.

When we first started our business, I had this grand idea that maybe we could help people in early recovery or recently out of jail with jobs. I’d seen companies like www.homeboyindustries.org build amazing organizations employing ex-convicts. I wanted to do something similar.

My partner and I have a ton of experience working with people in early recovery outside of SMB, so why couldn’t we integrate the two?

My partner was skeptical and almost hostile to the idea.

He’d managed blue-collar employees the entire time he’d been sober, and he repeatedly told me: it just didn’t work. It’s more trouble than it’s worth, and it will hurt the business significantly if we make this a cornerstone of how we operate.

I deferred to his experience until we needed to build a fence.

We had a handyman in our sober network who could do the job, but he’d been struggling. That fence took 3 months to build when it should have taken a week.

If you’re not an addict or an alcoholic, you can’t understand how crazy people will become when they’re actively using or drinking.

We’ve been burnt too many times trying to help people just get on their feet.

It’s sad because people helped us early on with jobs and grace, but we’ve just found it’s too disruptive for the business to be trying to help people with jobs. Your business is not a place for charity work. Do that elsewhere. Your business and your service will be better for it.

Instead, we actively work with struggling addicts/alcoholics outside our place of business, and if someone gets real sober time, we’ll consider hiring them.

If one of our employees shows signs of addiction or alcoholism, we do our best to help them, until it endangers others.

We’re uniquely positioned as business owners in recovery to point people in the direction of where they can find help.

But recovery is a long journey for most people. We’re here for that journey IF someone does the work OR it doesn’t impact our place of business.

We generally don’t care what you do in your free time - that’s on you. If you’re passing out with a fifth of vodka every night, but you show up on time and aren’t intoxicated on the job, you’re welcome to keep working for us until your substance use impacts your work.

We recently had an employee who was super open about his struggles. He knew we were in recovery, and we actively pointed him in the direction he could go to get help.

He never really took us up on any of our suggestions, but he kept showing up on time and doing a great job, so it was a non-issue for the actual business. He eventually moved, and we wish him well - I hope he gets help someday.

We’ve had other employees who could simply not stop getting stoned. They’d be hitting weed pens in the bathroom, etc. That can’t stand, so we let them go. The minute your substance use enters our place of business, you’re gone.

Finally, we don’t give a shit about your past, as long as you’ve shown you’re capable in the present.

We love hiring people who have long-term recovery. That’s our story. If you find someone who has a bit of a past, but years of showing how they've changed, consider yourself lucky - you likely found a fantastic employee with something to prove.

Early on in our journey, my partner and I decided that we would never let our recovery or our pasts bar us from opportunity. We’ve had to write letters to banks and investors sharing our story.

Every time, we look at each other and say: “what if they won’t accept that we’ve changed”. Our answer is always the same: “well, if they can’t accept who we were and who we’ve become, they’re not the right partners.”

By leading with who we were and who we’ve become, we’ve found some phenomenal partners and employees.

If ever you encounter a specific challenge with a team member and substance abuse or recovery, my DMs are open.