(Illustration by Curt Merlo)
In June 2009, I voluntarily moved into a halfway house for the homeless called the Star Gospel Mission in Charleston, S.C. I ended up living there for a full year. I shared a single room with 26 other men. Each of us had a bed and a locker—and not much else. Why did I do it?
There was an experiential reason: I had recently graduated from Furman University and had then spent several months in Kenya, where I worked at a school for orphans. There, I noticed a disconnection between those who want to help people and those who are on the receiving end of that help. I realized that the more deeply I empathized with the orphans at that school, the better chance I had of making a difference in their lives. When I came home, I saw that the same kind of disconnection existed with respect to low-income workers in the United States. I wanted to apply what I had learned in Kenya to my own community.
There was a philosophical reason: In his book Walden, Henry David Thoreau writes, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Later in the book, he offers an alternative to that plight: “If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.” As I watched my college peers take jobs or enter graduate programs, and as I considered my own plans, Thoreau’s insights occupied my mind.
And there was a spiritual reason: I wanted to test my actions against my beliefs. As a Christian, I believe that Christ came from heaven to walk in our shoes and to eliminate our obstacles. It only makes sense that I should do the same—that I should walk in others’ shoes and, if possible, eliminate the things that stand in their way.
While living at the mission, I noticed that many of the men who lived there worked regularly as day laborers. Even though they worked every day, they still couldn’t afford to rent a place of their own. I decided to spend some time working day labor myself. It was an eye-opening experience. I saw workers gather at 5:30 a.m. in a rundown cinder-block building to put their names on a list in the hope of landing a job for the day. I got a sense of how discouraging that way of life could be—the low pay, the hard work, the lack of dignity, the feeling of worthlessness.
Day labor agencies typically charge clients $13 an hour for a laborer’s work and then pay the laborer the legal minimum wage, which is $7.25 an hour in South Carolina. Some day laborers simply want to earn enough money to get by for the night. But others sincerely want to get ahead, and they are trapped in a tenuous work environment. Many customers, meanwhile, have an unmet need for a higher-quality workforce than most day labor agencies are able to provide.
The experience of living and working alongside day laborers led me to launch In Every Story Labor Services. It’s a temporary-staffing company, based in Charleston, but it’s different from most enterprises of its kind. We invest in workers and help them to reach their goals. As a result, we are able to offer a better service to our customers. Along the way, we are working to create a long-term solution to the problems associated with temporary work.
Staffing Story
The staffing industry offers special opportunities in the field of social enterprise. Since the current economic recovery began in 2009, companies have begun to use staffing services more frequently and in more varied ways than ever before, and the industry’s growth has significantly outpaced that of the economy overall. According to the Alternative Staffing Alliance, meanwhile, a growing number of alternative staffing organizations (ASOs)—both nonprofit and for-profit—have launched throughout the United States. Although many ASOs have been in operation since the 1970s, one-quarter of the 62 known enterprises that engage in social-purpose staffing have launched in the past five years. “We conservatively estimate that the [alternative staffing] sector annually employs about 30,000 workers in competitive jobs and generates $180 million in fee revenues,” says Janet Van Liere, who manages the Alternative Staffing Alliance.
ASOs exemplify many advantages of the social enterprise model. They offer the resilience and flexibility that come with market-based solutions. They provide an environment in which people can quickly acquire skills while working in a position that can develop into a long-term job or even a career. They also create opportunities for workers who face special barriers to employment. Many ASOs, in fact, focus on specific disadvantaged groups: the homeless, the disabled, veterans, people with criminal backgrounds, young people, and so on.
At In Every Story, we seek to outperform our competitors in the unglamorous and often negatively viewed day labor segment of the industry. We opened our first office in 2011, and we now place 140 workers in jobs every day. For the most part, we serve customers in four fields: construction, landscaping, hospitality, and city government. Through organic growth that derives from customer and employee referrals, In Every Story has grown by more than 80 percent per year, and in 2014 our revenues topped $3 million. This year, we hope to open a second branch in Greenville, S.C., and ultimately we aim to replicate our model in multiple US markets.
We regard deep empathy as a critical tool for helping both our workers and our customers to abide by the "Live your best story" principle.
In 2014, after several years of operating as a nonprofit, we recognized that a for-profit model would better help us accomplish our social mission. Our fundraising efforts had become a distraction from placing workers on job sites, and in any case the vast majority of our revenue comes directly from our customers. The for-profit model also allows us to bring on investors, and it gives us the ability to offer equity and franchising opportunities to some of our employees. Today, we run our business under the auspices of a for-profit entity called IES Labor Services LLC. That entity, in turn, donates a portion of its profits to a nonprofit arm that funds certain social benefits that we offer to day laborers.
“Your Best Story”
At In Every Story, we strive to help workers follow the principle “Live your best story.” We do so in three important ways.
First, on a financial level, we pay more than our competitors. We offer a minimum rate of $8 an hour, and the rates that most workers receive are higher. We also have a rewards program that works as follows: A worker sets a goal, and if he saves half of the money needed to meet that goal, we will pay him the other half. (I use “he” because most of our workers are men.)
Second, on a spiritual level, we seek to help workers by guiding them through a process that revolves around the idea of telling a story. When a worker fills out an application, we ask him a question: What’s your “next step,” and what stands between you and that step? A worker may write, “My goal is to be reunited with my children.” Later, he might come to our office in a state of agitation over a conflict that he had with a supervisor. Through conversation, we learn that the worker often struggles with resolving conflict. We then encourage him to view his problem in the context of a story. “Great authors use conflict to make stories matter,” we say. Seen in that light, the worker’s conflict with his supervisor becomes an opportunity to develop qualities like patience, perseverance, and an ability to communicate. We point out that those qualities will help the worker to reach his “next step”—to be reunited with his children.
Third, at a career-building level, we engage in a practice that we call “keeping the promise.” To back up the commitment that we make to workers, we encourage customers to hire each worker who has been on a job for 90 days. We also celebrate such hires by listing the names of newly employed workers in our lobby. In 2014, more than 30 laborers were able to achieve full-time employment through In Every Story.
In each of these areas, we are investing in workers’ lives, and that investment in turn enables us to offer a superior service to customers. We conduct regular Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys to gauge how these practices affect both workers and customers. Today, four years after I launched the company, we receive NPS ratings that are near the top of the industry as a whole.
At In Every Story, we regard deep empathy as a critical tool for helping both our workers and our customers to abide by the “Live your best story” principle. Indeed, we view empathy as its own reward. I’ll never forget the time when I was living at the Star Gospel Mission and my bunkmate, John, put me in my place. John was in his early forties and wanted to go back to community college. But he was afraid to do it. I became frustrated with him. I’d say, “John, I don’t get it. You’re clean cut, you’re a sharp guy, and going back to school is a normal thing to do.” One day, John asked why I hadn’t yet launched In Every Story Labor Services. I started giving him a list of reasons, but he stopped me and said, “Derek, I don’t get it. You’re clean cut, you’re a sharp guy, and starting a business is a normal thing to do.”
Not only did my experience at the mission help me better understand John’s obstacles, but it also helped me better understand my own. I came to see myself not as better or worse than other people—people like John—but instead as their equal. I realized that what makes any of us a success or a failure in life isn’t where we end up; it’s our willingness to face our fears, overcome obstacles, and reckon with what it means to “live [our] best story.”
Read more stories by Derek Snook.