Hans Becker’s company, which provides landscaping for businesses and homeowners, is less than a year old but already employs eight and logs $10,000 a month in sales in high season.
Such rapid growth has tested the first-time founder’s managerial skills. “It’s so hard to get professional help, man,” he says.
If Becker sounds like any other harried business owner, he isn’t.
Prior to starting his company last May, he served a five-year prison term (his fourth incarceration) in a minimum-security correctional facility in Cleveland, Texas.
Becker was in for a litany of parole violations that included simple assault, forging an ID, cocaine possession, and driving while intoxicated.
in 2007, he joined the Prison Entrepreneurship Program, a nonprofit initiative that works with the Texas Department of Criminal Justice to teach entrepreneurship to inmates.
Upon his release, Becker took the skills he learned through PEP and started Armadillo Tree & Shrub in Dallas.
Success stories like Becker’s have been getting a lot of notice lately.
A common cause of recidivism is an ex-convict’s difficulty in finding work.
Though employers are not supposed to discriminate based on a prison record, many take a pass on job applicants who have served time.
Photo by casspixx.