I hit bottom hard. Then I bounced back even higher.

I was the youngest of seven raised by his single mother on welfare in a mixed-race household. When I was younger, I learned from my mother how to work hard and succeed. I was the first from my family to conventionally graduate high school, the first to attend college, and the first to become successfully self-employed. For twenty-five years, I was successful. I wasMidwestern real estate broker, developer, investor, and consultant with over $700 million in career transactions.

I thought I could succeed at anything, right up until the time I didn’t.

The Great Recession arrived and I was stretched. Over-extended. Coupled with trusting the wrong people, overspending, and some bad business decisions, I suffered a catastrophic loss of the multi-million-dollar asset base I spent more than two decades building.

That was bad, but then it got worse. In my effort to stay afloat, I “robbed Peter to pay Paul,” stupidly temporarily misusing $135,000 of SBA loan proceeds. The result: a felony conviction and a ten-month sentence at Leavenworth Federal Prison Camp.

I was down. I had hit bottom. Hard. But my mother didn’t raise a quitter. I knew I needed to learn from my mistakes. I needed to reset my life and start over. And soon I realized, I wasn’t alone.

While serving my time, I noticed many of my fellow inmates developed legitimate business skills from life of the street. Their path was different than mine, their “businesses” different than mine, but we were in the same place with the same challenge ahead of us.

I decided to make resources to help incarcerated and formerly incarcerated citizens learn to use their “street skills” to make a legitimate business. The award-winning book and workbook “Illegal to Legal: Business Success for the (Formerly) Incarcerated” were born. “Illegal to Legal” is the gold-standard for teaching legitimate income sources to the incarcerated and formerly incarcerated.

Since serving my time, I have met every obligation and obstacle head on to rebuild my life and fully pay my debt to society. But I have also focused on helping the incarcerated, formerly incarcerated, and those at risk of being incarcerated create a legitimate source of income, either from a job, a small business, or both.  To help this marginalized group I launched the NATIONAL HIRE THE FORMERLY INCARCERATED CAMPAIGN. Sales of my book and workbook help support the Campaign.

Being Bob, and being in the building industry all of those year, I would often get teased by people calling me “Bob the Builder.” At first, I wasn’t thrilled being associated with a cartoon character. But then I realized that my whole life has been about growing, developing, and building himself and others, through:

• actual construction (my real estate development career)
• business startups, growth, and development (consulting, coaching, and investing)
• and “life building” (speaking, coaching, writing, teaching leadership development, prison ministry, mission trips.)

Now, instead of people calling me “Bob the Builder,” I am humbled and honored to be called “Bob the Life & Business Builder.” This is what second chances are all about.