{"id":472,"date":"2007-02-08T00:29:00","date_gmt":"2007-02-08T07:29:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jameswbreckenridge.ca\/breckenridge\/?p=472"},"modified":"2008-10-26T04:12:25","modified_gmt":"2008-10-26T11:12:25","slug":"businessman-altruist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jameswbreckenridge.ca\/?p=472","title":{"rendered":"Businessman – altruist"},"content":{"rendered":"

IN 1990, Steven T. Bigari was running a string of <\/span>McDonald\u2019s<\/span><\/a> franchises in Colorado Springs and spending most of his working hours thinking about the big bad wolf at his door, otherwise known as Taco Bell, which was killing his business with a promotional menu of items costing only 59 cents each<\/span><\/p>\n

One day, the restaurants\u2019 owner, Brent Cameron, who was also his mentor and friend, sat down with him over breakfast at one of the franchises, just off Highway 83. \u201cO.K., Steve, what\u2019s your plan?\u201d he asked.<\/p>\n

Mr. Bigari outlined the situation, and it was dire: their operations were hemorrhaging cash. Then he presented a plan to cut costs by eliminating, among other things, paid vacations for crew members. What happened next would change Mr. Bigari\u2019s life.<\/p>\n

\u201cBrent politely asked me to step into the vestibule and he stuck his finger in my face and used a foul word for one of the three times I ever heard one cross his lips,\u201d Mr. Bigari said. \u201cHe said, \u2018You can afford to give up your rizzing-razzing vacation, but they can\u2019t, so I hope you have a better plan than that.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Bigari said he got the message: take care of your people. It was a message that stuck with him even after Mr. Cameron died and Mr. Bigari became a top McDonald\u2019s franchisee himself \u2014 eventually owning 12 stores, three patents and a reputation for clever ideas, like letting customers pay with credit cards and outsourcing the drive-through. Even as his business grew, he kept Mr. Cameron\u2019s crew benefits in place, and began adding to them.<\/p>\n

Indeed, over time, he went much further. He created a system to help resolve the problems of the working poor who staffed his restaurants by pulling together or creating an array of services, from arranging day care to organizing transportation to making small emergency loans. The goal, he said, was to keep his employees on the job and focused on customers.<\/p>\n

Now he is trying to persuade others to offer this kind of help to their workers, not as an act of kindness or charity but as a way to reduce employee turnover and increase profit \u2014 as, he said, it did for him.<\/p>\n

This is a major challenge. After all, American business culture tends to focus on employees at the top, not at the bottom. And many don\u2019t want to be told that they pay workers poverty-level wages. Mr. Bigari says he thinks that they will see the light when they see the return they can get from helping the working poor, both as employees and as customers.<\/p>\n

MR. BIGARI, 47, is an unlikely candidate to save the working poor. He is a millionaire who lives in Colorado Springs, a politically conservative city that is far from the coastal enclaves of most social entrepreneurs, the catch phrase for people who come up with innovative, nongovernmental ways to address social problems. He has the no-nonsense short hair and straight back of a West Point<\/span><\/a> graduate. (He was in the class of 1982.)<\/span><\/p>\n

He acknowledged that his employees\u2019 pay scale \u2014 an average of $7 an hour in 2006, when he sold his stores \u2014 was less than a living wage in Colorado Springs, which he estimated at $12 an hour. He said that competitive pressures and overhead costs, including loan payments and licensing fees, prevented him from offering more, though he said he paid 25 to 75 cents an hour more than other local fast-food outlets.<\/p>\n

It is true that Mr. Bigari is relentlessly upbeat. The only time he recalls taking failure personally was in high school, when his football team, which had not lost a game in the three years he was a player, was crushed in a state semifinal. (He still remembers the name of the opposing player he could not block.) He was traumatized, but he eventually realized he had learned a great deal from this setback. He has created in himself an ability to see beyond failures, which he says he has all the time, and treat them as lessons learned.<\/p>\n

Over the last three years, he has moved his life in a different direction to help achieve his goal. He spent one year on a social entrepreneurship fellowship, sold his McDonald\u2019s franchises to devote himself fully to his nonprofit organization, America\u2019s Family, and received backing from a venture philanthropy fund.<\/p>\n

He had no such plans a decade ago, when he decided to continue Mr. Cameron\u2019s practice of making small, short-term no-interest personal loans to his employees to help them pay their rent, buy tires or meet other immediate needs. (He says he lent about $30,000 a year for 10 years, and only $960 was not paid back.)<\/p>\n

Back then, his goal was not to be a high-minded social entrepreneur or even an old-fashioned do-gooder. He just wanted to reduce employee turnover \u2014 the rates could hit 300 percent a year \u2014 by easing some of the problems that led so many of his workers to miss shifts or to quit.<\/p>\n

He did more than lend money: he worked with a local church to set up day care, and he educated employees about public services available to low-wage workers \u2014 in some cases, available to those whose incomes are up to 200 percent of poverty level.<\/p>\n

Reliable transportation was a near-universal problem for workers, so he started sneaking out to police auctions during lunch on Saturdays, the busiest period in his restaurants, to look for cheap and dependable cars. At first, he resold them at cost to his employees, then experimented with renting them to workers. He has tried other approaches, but has settled on having the foundation take in donated cars, then sell them to a local dealer who fixes them up and resells them to employees.
\nBy 2001, Mr. Bigari was calling his collection of programs McFamily Benefits, and it worked well, for his employees and for him. So well, in fact, that three professors at the University of Colorado<\/span><\/a> at Colorado Springs studied the program.<\/span><\/p>\n

They found that from 2000 to 2002, turnover rates fell sharply at all of Mr. Bigari\u2019s restaurants; three had rates at or below 100 percent. All of the employees who used some part of the programs said they felt motivated to work harder. In the same period, his profit margin rose more than three percentage points.<\/p>\n

Debra Powell, a divorced mother of five who managed one of Mr. Bigari\u2019s restaurants, said the program helped many of her crew workers, which in turn made her job easier. She herself had money problems, and Mr. Bigari found a budgeting course at a local nonprofit agency; it worked so well for her that she required all the managers in her store take it, partly because many of them had never had checking accounts.<\/p>\n

She used Mr. Bigari\u2019s program in 2003 to get a loan for a personal computer and in 2004 to buy the first car she had ever purchased, a used Chevrolet Cavalier she still drives.<\/p>\n

She says she misses Mr. Bigari at work, though she receives bigger bonuses now that the McDonald\u2019s Corporation runs her store. (Franchisees pay rent and licensing fees to the corporation that can total 16 percent of gross receipts, Mr. Bigari said. Company-owned stores do not have to pay, so they can be more generous to employees.)<\/p>\n

\u201cI would trade the money to go work for him again,\u201d Ms. Powell said. \u201cHe\u2019s not in it for himself; he\u2019s in it for the people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Inevitably, some of the people he helps suffer setbacks and cannot honor their obligations. Keeping track of them began to consume more and more of his workday, and those of some of his store managers. \u201cThat\u2019s when we knew we had to change the model,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

In 2002, the same year he remarried (he and his first wife divorced in 2000), Mr. Bigari morphed McFamily Benefits into an independent nonprofit group called America\u2019s Family. He chose the name because the goal was to offer the working poor the kind of guidance and support that traditionally came from families.<\/p>\n

He arranged for a local car dealer to create a used-car warranty program for participants, and persuaded a local credit union to make loans for things like cars and computers, and to make small, short-term loans so that employees could break free from rapacious payday lenders.<\/p>\n

America\u2019s Family had to guarantee the loans, but it was helping employees to build credit histories, even though many of them had never before used a bank. He also began working more directly with local charities and government agencies to ensure that employees who needed services got them, sometimes even persuading government offices to change their operating hours to help meet workers\u2019 needs.<\/p>\n

HE also began talking to local businesses about using America\u2019s Family. His first takers were two business owners who went to his church, Springs Community Church, part of the mainline Reformed Church in America. But, as even he has acknowledged, his plan needed a lot of work.<\/p>\n

\u201cSteve is a rah-rah-everything\u2019s-wonderful-here\u2019s-what-we\u2019re-going-to-do type of guy, and he\u2019s got this vision in his head, but it was difficult to get it boiled down for business owners,\u201d said Rebecca Kolb, who sells and supports janitorial franchises for a company called Jan-Pro.<\/p>\n

Ms. Kolb says that Mr. Bigari has refined his message and expanded America\u2019s Family\u2019s offerings in the last five years, and that she can now see clearly that it helps her franchisees retain employees. When Mr. Bigari is ready to expand America\u2019s Family nationally, she said, she will ask Jan-Pro to adopt it.<\/p>\n

He was spending more time on his charity efforts, but Mr. Bigari said he had no thought of selling his McDonald\u2019s franchises until he became an Ashoka fellow in late 2004. \u201cThis would\u2019ve just been a cool hobby if Ashoka hadn\u2019t come along,\u201d he said. Ashoka International finances social entrepreneurs worldwide.<\/p>\n

Trabian Shorters, a co-director of Ashoka U.S., said the group was drawn to Mr. Bigari by the unabashed scope of his dream. \u201cSteve wants to fix working poverty, period, for everybody,\u201d Mr. Shorters said. \u201cThat\u2019s audacious, but he means it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Barbara R. Kazdan, Ashoka U.S.\u2019s other co-director, credited Mr. Bigari\u2019s nonprofit group with devising a systemic rethinking of how to help the working poor. \u201cHe looked at the whole system that low-income people were caught up in and wanted to create a different kind of system to give them the support they need,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

As an Ashoka fellow, Mr. Bigari stepped aside from his franchises for a year to focus full time on his foundation. After his fellowship ended, in early 2006, he returned to his business. At one point, he told Mr. Shorters that one of his McDonald\u2019s outlets had bested a rival franchisee\u2019s record for serving customers at a drive-through \u2014 371 in one hour. Mr. Shorters congratulated him, then asked, \u201cHow do you top that?\u201d<\/p>\n

That got Mr. Bigari thinking about what he was doing with his life. Last February, at Mr. Shorters\u2019s urging, he went to a social entrepreneurship conference called the Gathering of Leaders, organized by New Profit Inc., a philanthropic venture fund. He left the meeting convinced that he should become a full-time social entrepreneur, and by June had sold his McDonald\u2019s franchises.<\/p>\n

That kind of speed reflects how Mr. Bigari likes to move. He jokes that he operates on Bigari Standard Time, which is a bit like life stuck in fast-forward. He is a consultant and a motivational speaker. He wrote and self-published a book about his ideas, \u201cThe Box You Got,\u201d in three months, after a conference organizer asked if he had a book that it could give to those in attendance.<\/p>\n

When Mr. Bigari got a too-good-to-be-true deal on a headquarters building for America\u2019s Family in Colorado Springs, he bought it in spite of the fact that it was 135,000 square feet too large. Then he brainstormed with friends and associates to build a mini-theme park called Mr. Biggs Family Fun Center, complete with laser tag, Go Kart racing and other diversions, and had it up and running in less than six months. (Biggs is his nickname, and he likes to talk about Bigg ideas; a sample: \u201cIf you are afraid of failure, get over it. Everybody fails.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Shorters says it is not unusual for social entrepreneurs to juggle several projects that may seem unrelated. Tom West, an investor who is chairman of Exit41 Inc., a point-of-sale software company that has worked with Mr. Bigari, said in all seriousness: \u201cYou don\u2019t want 100 percent of Steve. Ideally, you want maybe 12 percent of him.\u201d (Exit41 helped him develop a call center that saved money by consolidating the taking of drive-through orders from his McDonald\u2019s outlets.)<\/p>\n

Mr. Bigari notes that he is using the restaurant in his amusement center to train chefs and other food-service workers, and that his speaking gigs can motivate businesses to pay attention to low-income workers, whom he calls \u201cthe invisible people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Bigari says that he is at a starting point for the foundation, with a long road ahead; Ms. Kolb and others who know him said he has to prove that he can make the ideas work at businesses where the owners aren\u2019t part of his social network. He is using a $250,000, two-year investment from New Profit to expand his staff and develop his foundation\u2019s business model. He recently hired a sixth employee at America\u2019s Family, which has an annual budget of about $500,000.<\/p>\n

HE is also starting to sign up celebrity advocates who can help build his foundation\u2019s profile. His first is Daryl Simmons, a producer and songwriter, whom he met while negotiating a real estate deal. Mr. Simmons said he, too, had helped employees to buy cars and to learn about financial management. But, he added, \u201cI\u2019ve only done a crumb of what he\u2019s done.\u201d<\/p>\n

For his part, Mr. Bigari says he is inspired by people like Joseph Johnson, who had to drop out of college after a family emergency. After working for a time in Phoenix, he sought a job at a McDonald\u2019s in Colorado Springs where Mr. Bigari was then the operations manager, becoming operations manager himself when Mr. Bigari became an owner. Today, at 37, Mr. Johnson owns his own McDonald\u2019s, one of the franchises that Mr. Bigari sold in June. (The McDonald\u2019s Corporation bought the rest.)<\/p>\n

Mr. Johnson says that Mr. Bigari is a genuine leader, one who had no compunction about pitching in alongside minimum-wage workers at a fry station or behind a counter. \u201cThe one thing we could all appreciate about him was he wasn\u2019t just the guy who would vision up something \u2014 he\u2019d be the guy who was there to execute it, too,\u201d he said. \u201cYou weren\u2019t calling him in his timeshare in Hawaii; he was right there next to you.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Bigari says he knows he is tackling a far bigger problem than a McDonald\u2019s franchise has to face \u2014 a point he illustrates with a story about a beach strewn with starfish. A boy is throwing them back in the ocean, one by one, when a man comes by and says: \u201cWhat are you doing? You can\u2019t possibly make a difference here.\u201d<\/p>\n

Without looking up or pausing, the boy picks up another starfish, tosses it in the ocean and says, \u201cDid for that one.\u201d<\/p>\n

Daryl Simmons, a producer and songwriter, said he, too, had helped some of his employees to buy cars and to learn about financial management.<\/p>\n

Debra Powell, a mother of five who manages a McDonald\u2019s in Colorado Springs, used the America\u2019s Family program to get a loan to buy a PC and a car. She said the program also helped many of her crew workers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

IN 1990, Steven T. Bigari was running a string of McDonald\u2019s franchises in Colorado Springs and spending most of his working hours thinking about the big bad wolf at his door, otherwise known as Taco Bell, which was killing his business with a promotional menu of items costing only 59 cents each One day, the restaurants\u2019 owner, Brent Cameron, who was also his mentor and friend, sat down with him over breakfast at one of the franchises, just off Highway 83. \u201cO.K., Steve, what\u2019s your plan?\u201d he asked. Mr. Bigari outlined the situation, and it was dire: their operations were hemorrhaging cash. Then he presented a plan to cut costs by eliminating, among other things, paid vacations for crew members. What happened next would change Mr. Bigari\u2019s life. \u201cBrent politely asked me to step into the vestibule and he stuck his finger in my face and used a foul word for one of the three times I ever heard one cross his lips,\u201d Mr. Bigari said. \u201cHe said, \u2018You can afford to give up your rizzing-razzing vacation, but they can\u2019t, so I hope you have a better plan than that.\u2019 \u201d Mr. Bigari said he got the message: take care of your people. It was a message that stuck with him even after Mr. Cameron died and Mr. Bigari became a top McDonald\u2019s franchisee himself \u2014 eventually owning 12 stores, three patents and a reputation for clever ideas, like letting customers pay with credit cards and outsourcing the drive-through. Even as his business grew, he kept Mr. Cameron\u2019s crew benefits in place, and began adding to them. Indeed, over time, he went much further. He created a system to help resolve the problems of the working poor who staffed his restaurants by pulling together or creating an array of services, from arranging day care to organizing transportation to making small emergency loans. The goal, he said, was to keep his employees on the job and focused on customers. Now he is trying to persuade others to offer this kind of help to their workers, not as an act of kindness or charity but as a way to reduce employee turnover and increase profit \u2014 as, he said, it did for him. This is a major challenge. After all, American business culture tends to focus on employees at the top, not at the bottom. And many don\u2019t want to be told that they pay workers poverty-level wages. Mr. Bigari says he thinks that they will see the light when they see the return they can get from helping the working poor, both as employees and as customers. MR. BIGARI, 47, is an unlikely candidate to save the working poor. He is a millionaire who lives in Colorado Springs, a politically conservative city that is far from the coastal enclaves of most social entrepreneurs, the catch phrase for people who come up with innovative, nongovernmental ways to address social problems. He has the no-nonsense short hair and straight back of a West Point graduate. (He was in the class of 1982.) He acknowledged that his employees\u2019 pay scale \u2014 an average of $7 an hour in 2006, when he sold his stores \u2014 was less than a living wage in Colorado Springs, which he estimated at $12 an hour. He said that competitive pressures and overhead costs, including loan payments and licensing fees, prevented him from offering more, though he said he paid 25 to 75 cents an hour more than other local fast-food outlets. It is true that Mr. Bigari is relentlessly upbeat. The only time he recalls taking failure personally was in high school, when his football team, which had not lost a game in the three years he was a player, was crushed in a state semifinal. (He still remembers the name of the opposing player he could not block.) He was traumatized, but he eventually realized he had learned a great deal from this setback. He has created in himself an ability to see beyond failures, which he says he has all the time, and treat them as lessons learned. Over the last three years, he has moved his life in a different direction to help achieve his goal. He spent one year on a social entrepreneurship fellowship, sold his McDonald\u2019s franchises to devote himself fully to his nonprofit organization, America\u2019s Family, and received backing from a venture philanthropy fund. He had no such plans a decade ago, when he decided to continue Mr. Cameron\u2019s practice of making small, short-term no-interest personal loans to his employees to help them pay their rent, buy tires or meet other immediate needs. (He says he lent about $30,000 a year for 10 years, and only $960 was not paid back.) Back then, his goal was not to be a high-minded social entrepreneur or even an old-fashioned do-gooder. He just wanted to reduce employee turnover \u2014 the rates could hit 300 percent a year \u2014 by easing some of the problems that led so many of his workers to miss shifts or to quit. He did more than lend money: he worked with a local church to set up day care, and he educated employees about public services available to low-wage workers \u2014 in some cases, available to those whose incomes are up to 200 percent of poverty level. Reliable transportation was a near-universal problem for workers, so he started sneaking out to police auctions during lunch on Saturdays, the busiest period in his restaurants, to look for cheap and dependable cars. At first, he resold them at cost to his employees, then experimented with renting them to workers. He has tried other approaches, but has settled on having the foundation take in donated cars, then sell them to a local dealer who fixes them up and resells them to employees. By 2001, Mr. Bigari was calling his collection of programs McFamily Benefits, and it worked well, for his employees and for him. So well, in fact, that three professors at … Continue reading Businessman – altruist<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-472","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-other-writers","category-poverty"],"yoast_head":"\nBusinessman - altruist - James W. Breckenridge<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.jameswbreckenridge.ca\/?p=472\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Businessman - altruist - James W. Breckenridge\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"IN 1990, Steven T. Bigari was running a string of McDonald\u2019s franchises in Colorado Springs and spending most of his working hours thinking about the big bad wolf at his door, otherwise known as Taco Bell, which was killing his business with a promotional menu of items costing only 59 cents each One day, the restaurants\u2019 owner, Brent Cameron, who was also his mentor and friend, sat down with him over breakfast at one of the franchises, just off Highway 83. \u201cO.K., Steve, what\u2019s your plan?\u201d he asked. Mr. Bigari outlined the situation, and it was dire: their operations were hemorrhaging cash. Then he presented a plan to cut costs by eliminating, among other things, paid vacations for crew members. What happened next would change Mr. Bigari\u2019s life. \u201cBrent politely asked me to step into the vestibule and he stuck his finger in my face and used a foul word for one of the three times I ever heard one cross his lips,\u201d Mr. Bigari said. \u201cHe said, \u2018You can afford to give up your rizzing-razzing vacation, but they can\u2019t, so I hope you have a better plan than that.\u2019 \u201d Mr. Bigari said he got the message: take care of your people. It was a message that stuck with him even after Mr. Cameron died and Mr. Bigari became a top McDonald\u2019s franchisee himself \u2014 eventually owning 12 stores, three patents and a reputation for clever ideas, like letting customers pay with credit cards and outsourcing the drive-through. Even as his business grew, he kept Mr. Cameron\u2019s crew benefits in place, and began adding to them. Indeed, over time, he went much further. He created a system to help resolve the problems of the working poor who staffed his restaurants by pulling together or creating an array of services, from arranging day care to organizing transportation to making small emergency loans. The goal, he said, was to keep his employees on the job and focused on customers. Now he is trying to persuade others to offer this kind of help to their workers, not as an act of kindness or charity but as a way to reduce employee turnover and increase profit \u2014 as, he said, it did for him. This is a major challenge. After all, American business culture tends to focus on employees at the top, not at the bottom. And many don\u2019t want to be told that they pay workers poverty-level wages. Mr. Bigari says he thinks that they will see the light when they see the return they can get from helping the working poor, both as employees and as customers. MR. BIGARI, 47, is an unlikely candidate to save the working poor. He is a millionaire who lives in Colorado Springs, a politically conservative city that is far from the coastal enclaves of most social entrepreneurs, the catch phrase for people who come up with innovative, nongovernmental ways to address social problems. He has the no-nonsense short hair and straight back of a West Point graduate. (He was in the class of 1982.) He acknowledged that his employees\u2019 pay scale \u2014 an average of $7 an hour in 2006, when he sold his stores \u2014 was less than a living wage in Colorado Springs, which he estimated at $12 an hour. He said that competitive pressures and overhead costs, including loan payments and licensing fees, prevented him from offering more, though he said he paid 25 to 75 cents an hour more than other local fast-food outlets. It is true that Mr. Bigari is relentlessly upbeat. The only time he recalls taking failure personally was in high school, when his football team, which had not lost a game in the three years he was a player, was crushed in a state semifinal. (He still remembers the name of the opposing player he could not block.) He was traumatized, but he eventually realized he had learned a great deal from this setback. He has created in himself an ability to see beyond failures, which he says he has all the time, and treat them as lessons learned. Over the last three years, he has moved his life in a different direction to help achieve his goal. He spent one year on a social entrepreneurship fellowship, sold his McDonald\u2019s franchises to devote himself fully to his nonprofit organization, America\u2019s Family, and received backing from a venture philanthropy fund. He had no such plans a decade ago, when he decided to continue Mr. Cameron\u2019s practice of making small, short-term no-interest personal loans to his employees to help them pay their rent, buy tires or meet other immediate needs. (He says he lent about $30,000 a year for 10 years, and only $960 was not paid back.) Back then, his goal was not to be a high-minded social entrepreneur or even an old-fashioned do-gooder. He just wanted to reduce employee turnover \u2014 the rates could hit 300 percent a year \u2014 by easing some of the problems that led so many of his workers to miss shifts or to quit. He did more than lend money: he worked with a local church to set up day care, and he educated employees about public services available to low-wage workers \u2014 in some cases, available to those whose incomes are up to 200 percent of poverty level. Reliable transportation was a near-universal problem for workers, so he started sneaking out to police auctions during lunch on Saturdays, the busiest period in his restaurants, to look for cheap and dependable cars. At first, he resold them at cost to his employees, then experimented with renting them to workers. He has tried other approaches, but has settled on having the foundation take in donated cars, then sell them to a local dealer who fixes them up and resells them to employees. By 2001, Mr. Bigari was calling his collection of programs McFamily Benefits, and it worked well, for his employees and for him. So well, in fact, that three professors at … Continue reading Businessman – altruist →\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.jameswbreckenridge.ca\/?p=472\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"James W. Breckenridge\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2007-02-08T07:29:00+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2008-10-26T11:12:25+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"James W. Breckenridge\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"James W. Breckenridge\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"13 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.jameswbreckenridge.ca\\\/?p=472#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.jameswbreckenridge.ca\\\/?p=472\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"James W. 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Then he presented a plan to cut costs by eliminating, among other things, paid vacations for crew members. What happened next would change Mr. Bigari\u2019s life. \u201cBrent politely asked me to step into the vestibule and he stuck his finger in my face and used a foul word for one of the three times I ever heard one cross his lips,\u201d Mr. Bigari said. \u201cHe said, \u2018You can afford to give up your rizzing-razzing vacation, but they can\u2019t, so I hope you have a better plan than that.\u2019 \u201d Mr. Bigari said he got the message: take care of your people. It was a message that stuck with him even after Mr. Cameron died and Mr. Bigari became a top McDonald\u2019s franchisee himself \u2014 eventually owning 12 stores, three patents and a reputation for clever ideas, like letting customers pay with credit cards and outsourcing the drive-through. Even as his business grew, he kept Mr. Cameron\u2019s crew benefits in place, and began adding to them. Indeed, over time, he went much further. He created a system to help resolve the problems of the working poor who staffed his restaurants by pulling together or creating an array of services, from arranging day care to organizing transportation to making small emergency loans. The goal, he said, was to keep his employees on the job and focused on customers. Now he is trying to persuade others to offer this kind of help to their workers, not as an act of kindness or charity but as a way to reduce employee turnover and increase profit \u2014 as, he said, it did for him. This is a major challenge. After all, American business culture tends to focus on employees at the top, not at the bottom. And many don\u2019t want to be told that they pay workers poverty-level wages. Mr. Bigari says he thinks that they will see the light when they see the return they can get from helping the working poor, both as employees and as customers. MR. BIGARI, 47, is an unlikely candidate to save the working poor. He is a millionaire who lives in Colorado Springs, a politically conservative city that is far from the coastal enclaves of most social entrepreneurs, the catch phrase for people who come up with innovative, nongovernmental ways to address social problems. He has the no-nonsense short hair and straight back of a West Point graduate. (He was in the class of 1982.) He acknowledged that his employees\u2019 pay scale \u2014 an average of $7 an hour in 2006, when he sold his stores \u2014 was less than a living wage in Colorado Springs, which he estimated at $12 an hour. He said that competitive pressures and overhead costs, including loan payments and licensing fees, prevented him from offering more, though he said he paid 25 to 75 cents an hour more than other local fast-food outlets. It is true that Mr. Bigari is relentlessly upbeat. The only time he recalls taking failure personally was in high school, when his football team, which had not lost a game in the three years he was a player, was crushed in a state semifinal. (He still remembers the name of the opposing player he could not block.) He was traumatized, but he eventually realized he had learned a great deal from this setback. He has created in himself an ability to see beyond failures, which he says he has all the time, and treat them as lessons learned. Over the last three years, he has moved his life in a different direction to help achieve his goal. He spent one year on a social entrepreneurship fellowship, sold his McDonald\u2019s franchises to devote himself fully to his nonprofit organization, America\u2019s Family, and received backing from a venture philanthropy fund. He had no such plans a decade ago, when he decided to continue Mr. Cameron\u2019s practice of making small, short-term no-interest personal loans to his employees to help them pay their rent, buy tires or meet other immediate needs. (He says he lent about $30,000 a year for 10 years, and only $960 was not paid back.) Back then, his goal was not to be a high-minded social entrepreneur or even an old-fashioned do-gooder. He just wanted to reduce employee turnover \u2014 the rates could hit 300 percent a year \u2014 by easing some of the problems that led so many of his workers to miss shifts or to quit. He did more than lend money: he worked with a local church to set up day care, and he educated employees about public services available to low-wage workers \u2014 in some cases, available to those whose incomes are up to 200 percent of poverty level. Reliable transportation was a near-universal problem for workers, so he started sneaking out to police auctions during lunch on Saturdays, the busiest period in his restaurants, to look for cheap and dependable cars. At first, he resold them at cost to his employees, then experimented with renting them to workers. He has tried other approaches, but has settled on having the foundation take in donated cars, then sell them to a local dealer who fixes them up and resells them to employees. By 2001, Mr. Bigari was calling his collection of programs McFamily Benefits, and it worked well, for his employees and for him. So well, in fact, that three professors at … Continue reading Businessman – altruist →","og_url":"https:\/\/www.jameswbreckenridge.ca\/?p=472","og_site_name":"James W. Breckenridge","article_published_time":"2007-02-08T07:29:00+00:00","article_modified_time":"2008-10-26T11:12:25+00:00","author":"James W. 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