 Ladies and gentlemen, now please welcome Brian Kelly. Good morning, FICON. Good morning, FICON. My name is Brian Kelly. I'm the CEO of the Prison Entrepreneurship Program. We are a groovy and growing social enterprise in Texas that believes that entrepreneurship is the vehicle for transformation and reentry for our returning citizens. You know, I spoke a few years ago at the University of North Texas to a group of entrepreneurship students. It was about a hundred of them. And I asked them, I said, you know, you're studying entrepreneurship. What is an entrepreneur? And I got crickets. And I said, no, no, I kind of go to them. I said, this is going to be interactive. This is going to be participatory. And I said, what's an entrepreneur? And a feeble hand in the back raised her arm and said an entrepreneur is somebody who sees a problem or a gap in society and sees that as an opportunity, an opportunity to make money or an opportunity to make a difference. And I was like, mic drop. That's awesome. That's right. What I realized is entrepreneurship is optimism. It's hope. It's a way of life. It's a viewpoint. It's lemons to lemonade. And I realized this fits our incarcerated population perfectly. So I want to give you a viewpoint of the economics of reentry when you're coming out of prison. So I'm going to ask you to think not outside the box, but inside the box for a little bit of what it's like for somebody coming out of prison. And I share this with our participants all the time. It's what they're going to encounter when they come out, even when they're coming out with us. So you get out of prison, you're filled with hope, enthusiasm. You're ready to embrace the struggle or like I tell them, embrace the suck because it's going to be difficult. It's not going to be the romanticized version of reentry and freedom that you're encountered. It's going to be difficult. But they get out, transitional house. And like ours, we have two weeks of grace period, but then we start charging $100 a week, which we're on the low end of that. So they get out, let's say they very quickly get a job at $10 an hour, bringing home $3.30 a week, right? But they've got to pay rent, $100. They've got to eat, let's assume $15 a day, another $100, $105, that's $205 already, right? I assume they're going to get a phone because they want to communicate with the world. Another $75, we're at $2.80. Perhaps they have transportation to get to and from work another $25.30, right? Roughly $3.10. Maybe you have parole fees. Perhaps you go to the thrift store to get some clothes to wear to go to work. Our check's eating up. At $10 an hour, you're breaking even and the struggle will become overwhelming. And so very quickly they realize that I need to get a car so I can go out and get a better job, right? So even a mid-level car, let's just say a $200 a month payment, $100 insurance, maybe $100 of upkeep and gas and everything, very conservative estimates, you better be making $14 an hour. But with rent and a car, you're still breaking even. You're not gaining anywhere. And sooner or later, six months, nine months, a year in a transitional house, you're going to want to move out and really feel like you belong in freedom. Get your own place. And I tell you what, if you get your own place and you've got that car and you'd like to eat, you better be making $18 an hour. But guess what? You're still breaking even. You're not getting anywhere. You're going to become discouraged. You're going to become disillusioned. And I know that once you've been out six months, nine months, a year, you want to feel connected. You probably want to have a relationship, right? And ladies, I've told my guys that if you aren't prepared to pay at least 400 bucks a month for entertainment of your girlfriend, you're in trouble. And so now you need to be making $22 an hour just to have a modest apartment, a modest car, and a little bit of social life. But at $22 an hour, you're breaking even. You're going to get discouraged. So I tell the guys that you need to get out as quickly as possible to make $25 an hour. Now, which one of you sitting in prison can do that very quickly getting out of prison if very few hands go up? But guess what? That is the magic of entrepreneurship. Guys can get out, get a job, get on their feet, reestablish themselves financially, mentally, socially. And once they get on their feet, start a job while performing their job, have that passive stream of revenue, build it up, prove their concept, move from their job to running their business, and we're making a difference. Their lives are changed. They're impacting their community. They're leading their family. It's dignity restored. Oh, but it's a needle to thread. And it's very difficult. So I wanted to share with you an analogy I think we've probably all heard. And it's if a man is starving, I can give him a fish and he'll eat and he'll be satisfied. And he'll appreciate it. He'll thank you. He'll love you. But the next day, he's hungry again. The next day, he's probably going to be more dependent upon you to give him a fish. But what if we give that man a rod and reel? What if we teach him how to fish that he can feed himself? Right? We just went from rescue to recovery. Right? We have taught him how to sustain himself. But now what if we give that man a net and teach him how to go out and catch more fish? He can feed his family. He can provide for his family. That's the dignity of providing and leading. We've went from rescue to recovery to remedy. But I want to take that to a whole another level. Like my guys inside like to say. What if we get him multiple nets and teach him how to run a fishing business? What if we teach him how to borrow money to get a boat to hire some people to teach them how to fish and go out and capture enough fish to not only feed his families to feed his employees' families and feed the community. We have went from rescue to recovery to remedy to what I like to call enrichment. We are impacting our communities. We have taken somebody who is kind of the worst player on the team and making him a contributor in society. In my terms, like the 1990 Bulls, if I was on that team, old fat, no jumping, no dribbling white guy on the team, I'd bring that team down. But you replaced me with another bald-headed guy named Michael Jordan. The team changes. Our community has changed. When we take somebody coming out of prison, spark them with entrepreneurship, give them the support to get that going. They impact their communities. I want to tell you about a study done on our organization. We have had about 400 businesses started by our released entrepreneurs. Of those, most are pretty modest. They're a sole proprietorship, but I would say a little over half will end up employing some people, typically their PEP brothers. Several have had revenues of over a million dollars last year, pretty significant impacting their community. Michael Porter, Professor at Harvard, has an organization in Boston called the Initiative for Competitive Intercity, ICIC. They came and did a study on us last year. And they found that a modest little social enterprise like us, with a $2.8 million budget, made a $122 million impact on the state of Texas. Reduced incarceration costs, impacting the community that reverberates out. That is a great ROI. I know my number crunchers are in the audience thinking, wow, can that really be true? You can look that up. Pairing reentry with entrepreneurship is a no-brainer because it's a way of life. It's optimism. It's hope. It's opportunity. Our prisons in America are opportunity deserts. They're hope deserts. You can go in there and you can feel the hopelessness. It permeates everything. But we're changing that through entrepreneurship. We're changing that through a new way to look at life. A friend of mine about a year ago said that the secret to life is not a startup business. It's a startup life. I couldn't agree more. Let me tell you about one of our participants. Grew up in a broken home, working class family, alcoholism, ran rampant. He grew up with what I would say is unrealized potential and lived a party and partied a live. Worked a series of menial jobs and got more entrenched in alcoholism and addiction and spiraled out of control and ended up taking a man's life in a drug deal gone horribly wrong. Not that he'd go right, but this was horribly wrong. He would get a life sentence for murder and go to prison. A life lost. Opportunity lost, right? And maybe that's where he belonged. Somewhere in prison the light came on and he decided he didn't want to be part of the problem. He wanted to be part of the solution. Even if he never got out of prison, he wanted to be part of the solution. So he went to school, went to church, went to recovery, started helping men just like him so they wouldn't have the problems that he's encountered. He decided even if he never left prison he was going to help them. Somewhere along the way he encountered our program and really got the spark of entrepreneurship, the spark of seeing the world through a different set of lenses. And through a miracle of grace ended up getting out of prison after nearly 22 years. He would apply the things that he learned from our entrepreneurship program and get out and see the world through those different lenses and try to make a difference, try to give back and try to make lemonade out of the lemons that came his way. He would try to spend his money wisely. He got a job and he did a great job because he understood the working systems of a business he was able to add value to that organization. And they loved him. And he moved up the ranks and gave him more. To he who is faithful in a few things, more things will be given to him. And that was true in his life. And so he moved up the ranks. He moved up the ranks so much that they ended up making him CEO of that organization. And he would one day jump on a plane, fly to Atlanta and stand on this stage right in front of you. That guy's me. You guys, I'm nothing special. I've just got that spirit of entrepreneurship. I've got the same spirit that you've got. And our men and women in prison are desperate for that. None of us get here alone. None of us get up on this stage alone. It takes a community. Crime is a community problem. I get that. But it's going to take a community solution. We're in this together. We're in the brotherhood of man. We have untapped human potential in our prisons. People who are desperately wanting to turn their life around, they just don't know how. I believe entrepreneurship is a great way to do it because it changes the mindset. It changes what's going to happen in our communities. It changes what's going to happen in our world. I think we take reentry and couple that with entrepreneurship. We get reentry per newer. I heard T.K. yesterday and I want to kind of back up on him. When I do that again, I want this to be participatory. I'm going to say when we couple reentry with entrepreneurship, I want you to go, I think when we take reentry and couple it with entrepreneurship, we get reentry per newer. You guys are awesome. I love you. God bless you.