An alcoholic sent me an email a while back, asking me to help him get started in the recovery business. He wasn't asking for money. But he was asking for advice, which I'm happy to give anybody. I sent him an email, telling him that I'd be in touch with him.
And I'll contact him because I think it's important to encourage others to help addicts and alcoholics any way they can. Some might say that's stupid. Why would someone who's already in the recovery business give someone advice about how to get into the same business? It's kind of like calling McDonald's and asking them to help you start a hamburger stand. But I believe it's important to help others however you can.One of the things this fellow mentioned was about finding money to get started. But the reality is that if you want to get into the recovery business - or most any other business - money is the least of your problems.
The biggest issue for most people is perseverance and self-discipline.
I remember that I searched for a piece of property for a good six months before I found three dilapidated houses on a piece of property that I was able to get for $375 in closing costs. After I spent a year in another halfway house learning how to run a recovery business. I moved into my own houses. I started cleaning. Painting. Patching floors. I spent about two months getting the place ready for the first five residents. And while doing this, I worked an outside job to support myself and to buy materials to get the houses ready.
Getting started was a slow and tedious process of drudgery and hard work. But people started showing up. Most had no money, but if they looked like they had some willingness I let them stay. Within a year we acquired other houses and had over 130 residents. Within two years we had about 300 residents, and of course more property to accommodate them.
After two years we got so busy I quit my outside job and devoted full time to running the halfway houses. I also started paying myself a small stipend each week to cover my expenses. The expenses weren't large: food, mortgage payments, utilities, and transportation. Fortunately, enough clients paid service fees to cover expenses.
The drift here is that it doesn't really take money to start a successful business. What it does take is a burning desire to succeed at what you're doing. In my case, the burning desire was to stay sober and I knew that one way I could do that was being around other addicts and alcoholics who were also sober. But the process of helping other alcoholics while staying sober myself was sometimes daunting.
There's a lot more to the recovery business than meets the eye. There are groups to run. Meals to prepare. Utilities to pay. Arguments to defuse. City officials showing up, wondering if you have the right permits. Addicts who will live with you for two or three weeks, then leave when they get their first paycheck.
It can be a heartbreaking business, one that grinds you down and wears you out. The only thing that kept us going in those early days was perseverance and having the discipline to get up each day to help the constant stream of addicts and alcoholics who kept coming to our doors. And we helped them, no matter what.
That's what made us the success we are today – we never gave up and we never quit. We put everything we had into our project and kept reinvesting until it hurt. And today there are new people coming in who share that same perseverance self-discipline. And they too will reap the blessings of their efforts.
Just as those of us who have been here for many years.
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