Cornbread Hustle

We are a staffing agency for second chances. We help people coming out of prison and people in recovery find meaningful employment or become entrepreneurs. 

1 out of 4 Americans have a criminal record. 95% of all inmates will get out of prison eventually. We have a solution to build the gap between the employee and the employer when it comes to matching talent to job openings despite criminal history. 

We are not a non-profit. We are a social enterprise. We believe that it pushes us to make a difference by knowing we only get paid if we help someone get a job. We operate like a staffing agency would: We mark up the hourly pay for the employee or charge a direct hire fee. 

Our solution solves the issue of people in recovery or people with criminal backgrounds struggling to find work. We actively interview hundreds of people a week to place in jobs that are meaningful to them and complimentary to their growth plan. 

Our core values are: EAT

Empowerment, Accountability, and Transparency. 

We focus on education & community to help leaders understand 2nd chance hiring and addiction in the workplace.

Recently, with the COVID19 crisis, we lost a lot of our jobs. Considering the only way we pay our bills is if we help people find jobs, needless to say we were nervous. We quickly developed and deployed a disinfecting company. This brought in great revenue and allowed us to keep our employees working while providing new opportunities. Now, staffing is picking back up and our disinfecting business is still in full swing

We operate like a typical staffing agency when it comes to how we make money, however our business model is very different. We focus on community and education for leaders in HR that can make second chance hiring decisions. We also exclusively staff for people who have felonies or in drug or alcohol recovery. All of our applicants receive hand on support for their transitions in their career and personally. We have a resilience advocate on staff who works with our employees on a weekly bases to help them with their recovery plan. We don't like to see other staffing agencies that help people with criminal backgrounds as competitors because we are all in this together and there is a lot of work to be done and a lot of people who need help. There are however many re-entry non-profit organizations that do second chance staffing and we love to partner with them. We have not seen any direct competitors as of yet, however there have been a few that have reached out to seek advice because they are planning to get into the market. 

We do not have our own patent for technology, however we use Lever. It's an ATS software that works really nice for what we do. Most staffing agencies wouldn't use this software, as it's for internal HR needs for larger companies. However, it works for us because we treat all of our temp employees as in house full time employees and continue with them on their walk whether they are getting a pay check through us or not. 

The technology we use only helps us keep track of what we are doing off of the computer. The technology is great because it helps us prove our results by collecting data.

We have already started to see long term change with our efforts. For starters, we were part of helping with a news story that changed the CARES PPP application to allow people with a criminal record to apply if they haven't had an arrest in 1 year versus 5 years. Our goal is to make major change when it comes to barriers that keep people with felonies from achieving meaningful employment or starting a business. 

Current number: 550 people are currently in our network as a "hustler". Meaning they've been interviewed and accepted into our program. 

in one year: 2,500

In 5 years: Hard to imagine but I believe it will be 50,000+

Our goal is to grow much larger than just a staffing agency. We are currently building a church and looking towards creating a faith-based sober coworking space to help incubate our hustlers who have business ideas. We would also want this to be a community for professionals in recovery to freely come and get work done while taking advantage of our community speakers and workshops. Right now, Cornbread Hustle places people in jobs all across Texas. My goal is that we are in every major city across the United States. I would love to scale globally. I would just need to understand prison culture in different countries so I could effectively help people become successful with the right opportunities. 

Having the right people in the right seat as well as maturing our processes and workflows. As a staffing agency for second chances, there's a lot of "fires" to put out and unique situations. We work with people of all backgrounds ranging from history of sexual abuse, addiction, to murder convictions. We are still struggling to create and document scaleable processes and workflows. 

We have been very focused on selling more to increase revenue so there is financial room to make smart and slow hires to ensure that we have the right people in the right seat. We have been very serious about taking look at our strengths and weaknesses in order to find the right people to help us get to the next level. 

We currently have 5 full-time in house employees. 

We have about 30 temp employees that we have working on other job sites. 

We specifically hire people who have gone through an impressive transition and understands the people we are serving. Every single one of our employees are in recovery, spent time in prison, or has a criminal record. We are all passionate about second chances and transforming lives. What's more important, is making sure we have a great environment for our own personal growth, so we hold each other accountable day to day. 

We are in the United Way 2021 cohort. 

We have partnered with the city of Dallas, many probation offices, just about every re-entry non profit organization in Dallas/Fort Worth, rehab clinics, prison organizations and judges and courthouses. We work with any organization that is in the business of helping people transform their lives. Employment is a very big part of life transformation so we usually plug into most organizations who are helping people through their second chance journey. 

We first and foremost serve our applicants who need our assistance in finding a second chance. We are able to do that by finding employers to be our clients for second chance hiring. We charge employers a markup of hourly pay or a percentage of the annual salary of the employee. For example, if a employer wants to hire one of our "hustlers" for $90k/year, we will charge a $18,000 placement fee with a 90 day guarantee. If that employee doesn't work out within the 90 days, we will replace them free of charge. 

We charge our clients (employers) a fee to hire from our population of "hustlers" AKA: people coming out of prison or people in recovery. We have recently created and deployed a disinfecting company in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis which has brought in additional funding to help us grow our staffing efforts.  

I believe this will help us develop our leadership skills and provide mentoring to help us get to the next level. I mentioned that our barriers are creating scaleable processes and workflows and I believe this opportunity can help us tremendously. 

It would be really great to have help expanding our efforts using the right tools, technology, and talent. We also could use expert advice when it comes to our current processes to be sure we are crossing our t's and dotting our i's when it comes to regulations of employment and hiring laws.

We do not have any specific names in mind. However, we would like to get in front of the right influencers and leadership to help decision makers in our Country understand the day to day of what people are dealing with when getting out of prison. For instance, did you know that all of the prisoners released due to COVID19 were not able to get their identification? Meaning they weren't able to get a job? Did you know that when someone gets out of prison, sometimes they get an ankle monitor and unable to accept a job offer because of home confinement? These are just two of the many issues people are facing in our country and we would like to partner with the right organizations to help us get the information into the right hands to create real change in our country. 

I feel that Cornbread Hustle qualifies for this prize because we are advocates for good jobs and inclusive entrepreneurship for people in recovery and people coming out of prison. We work on these efforts all day every day and advocate for fair chance hiring and second chances aggressively. We will use the money to add talent to our team to help us expand our reach. We are currently not able to help as many people as we would like because we are not able to make new hires until we make more revenue.