Weifield Group Hires “At Risk” Individuals and with Good Reason!

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This product is not intended to diagnose, treat or cure any disease. Fall is just around the corner and home is the center of it all. At Ashley, seasonal decorating is a breeze with their range of designs and materials. Snuggle up on a family-friendly sectional or an ultra-modern sofa or gather outside and enjoy the crisp, cool air with a new fire pit or conversation set. From minor refreshes to total overhauls, Ashley has the essentials to make your home fall functional and fabulous.

Shop in-store or visit ashley.com today. This is Lee Habib and this is Our American Stories and we tell stories about everything here on this show. From the arts to sports and from business to history and everything in between. Including your stories.

Send them to ouramericanstories.com. They're some of our favorites. And today we bring you the story of Kurt Anderson, a man whose life was turned around by a company. And Carla Nugent, one of the founding partners of that company. Here's Robbie with the story. Kurt Anderson's childhood was pretty normal until tragedy struck. 1987, I lost my brother Brian to a motorcycle accident. And then started getting involved with some alcohol and marijuana.

Instead of turning it into something positive, I took it the wrong way. I just went downhill from there and I did manage to stay in school and get my GED though. Just from there, you know, the alcohol got worse and worse and 21 years old, you know, cocaine and reduced to methamphetamines. I was in and out of jail. Didn't really have a good job or anything like that or a career.

I was just in and out of restaurants doing short order cook type work. You know, I had met a girl. We had some kids together and I was pretty much a knucklehead all through my 30s. She actually ended up leaving me because I was just out of control.

I would pay the bills or whatever, but other than that, it was just my addiction. Started getting felonies and getting in trouble with the law. I caught my first felony in 2002, 2003, somewhere in there and was given a chance to do probation.

Didn't do so well at that. Did it for about two months and then kind of went AWOL, so to speak. Ended up catching another felony case on felony probation and they gave me five years ISP, intense supervised probation. I did okay with that for about, not quite a year. Ended up catching another case, which was my third felony.

So they sent me to DOC on that one. Department of Corrections. 2005, I went to prison. Three year sentence. I was denied for parole.

Pretty much did the whole time. So I was released in late 2008. In Colorado, you have a mandatory parole. So I did good on that. Completed my parole.

Was doing okay. Was pretty much clean off of meth for my whole time on parole. And then once I got off parole, drove right back into my addiction again and caught another felony. 2010, for my fourth, fifth and sixth felony. They were trying to make it a habitual crime. It like enhances your sentence.

So I was looking at like 20 years DOC. I was lucky enough to get the opportunity to go to Pier One. It's a therapeutic community.

I got to Pier One on 9-11-12. They call it your clean day is what they call it when the day you enter the program. The graduation percent is only like 11 or 12 percent of the people that go to that program actually complete it. They pretty much try to reprogram your whole way of thinking. You know, the first six months you don't have any contact with your family.

It's pretty intense. They kind of want you to get really in touch with yourself. Bad decisions that you've made. Be done with them.

Get them out there. Talk about it. Because see, that was me. I never talked about my problems. Oh, I don't have a drug problem.

I'm not an alcoholic. You know, I'm OK where I'm at. You know, the rent's paid.

The food's in the fridge. But I'm not home for four or five days because I'm out ripping and running, you know. So, you know, they just want you to really be OK with who you are and where you want to go in your life. After I progressed through the program, I got to the part where I could go out and find a job. Immediately went back to the restaurant and I was just like, I don't I don't want to do this anymore. I just I don't like it.

It reminded me of the old me. And then I was blessed enough to meet somebody in the program that had got hired on at Wayfield. So why don't you go try to be an electrician?

They put you through school. It's a great company. I said, that sounds like a good idea.

I think I'll go do that. And that's what I went and did in 2014. February is when I got hired at Wayfield.

Carla Nugent is one of the founders and chief business development officer at Wayfield Group, one of the top electrical contracting companies in Colorado. At Wayfield, they believe that just because you have a past doesn't mean you can't have a future. Parents come up to me at some of these different events we do and just start crying and, you know, thank you for giving my son an opportunity. Like he had made these bad decisions, hanging around the wrong people. He's such a good kid. But then when he got out of, you know, his sentencing, nobody would give him a job and believe in him.

Maybe fast food, maybe lawn service, but nobody would look at him as far as a career. And you guys treated him as anyone else that you would hire, you know, and weren't cautious about his background, looked at it as that's a bad decision. Let's move forward and make good decisions. And so those stories are like, wow, we're making a systemic change. Right.

And sharing those stories, I think, is powerful and important. And the thing I've been surprised is when we started to do this years ago, we thought it's the right thing to do. We didn't know that we'd have high success rate.

Right. We bring somebody in. We didn't know what to expect. We thought we're going to believe the best in them, set up a program, move forward. And quickly, these individuals were at a point of like, I've made bad decisions. I'm at a point of accountability.

And I'm ready to go and start a career. And you were just listening to Carla Nugent and she is one of the founding partners of the Wayfield Group. And again, one of Colorado's largest electrical contracting companies. And what a heart they have for people.

You're also hearing from Kurt Anderson, who was just, well, he was lucky when we come back. More from Carla and Kurt Anderson here on Our American Stories. Folks, if you love the great American stories we tell and love America like we do, we're asking you to become a part of the Our American Stories family. If you agree that America is a good and great country, please make a donation. A monthly gift of seventeen dollars and seventy six cents is fast becoming a favorite option for supporters. Go to Our American Stories dot com now and go to the donate button and help us keep the great American stories coming.

That's Our American Stories dot com. Hey, you guys, this is Tori and Jenny with the 9 0 2 1 OMG podcast. We have such a special episode brought to you by nerd tech O.D.T.

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Make your story a strong one. I like a banded duck more than the next guy. I would not shoot a banded big game animal with a collar on it because it would feel like touched.

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And one had a collar. Be sure to check out the Meat Eater podcast on Mondays, on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to yours. Fall is just around the corner and home is the center of it all. At Ashley, seasonal decorating's a breeze with their range of designs and materials. Snuggle up on a family friendly sectional or an ultra modern sofa. Or gather outside and enjoy the crisp, cool air with a new fire pit or conversation set from minor refreshes to total overhauls. Ashley has the essentials to make your home fall functional and fabulous.

Shop in store or visit Ashley dot com today. And we continue here with our American stories and the story of Wayfield Group, the Colorado electrical contracting company that finds much of its success in treating people well, like people. Here's more from Carla Nugent, the woman who helped start Wayfield Group and Kurt Anderson, a man whose life Wayfield changed for the good. My passion for nonprofit community, you know, for Christ and starting Wayfield Group and that no matter what we did, I wanted to figure out how we could give back to the community. And it was nice because we were on the same page on the partnership side that that's the right thing to do when we started. None of my partners knew Christ did not have that faith, have different stories. And so it was neat how they still trusted my dreams and my vision and my faith and doing the right thing and play it forward.

Now, 18 years later, two of them do know the Lord. But it's just neat to see how God's used that, I think, soften their hearts and how we care for people here at work. And it's become part of our culture now.

Right. Where we have our values, our packed PACT people, advanced processes, community and trusted relationships. Everything we do, we make very simple to bring back to that. We want our employees. We want to be known for that through our employees, but also on the customer side that we're all about our people. And we build really cool projects.

But it's our experiences with people that we share our time with. Yeah, I'm not the typical person you probably run into in our industry. We're probably 8 percent of construction would be made up of women. I appreciate, I think, being a woman in our industry, and I think I can pull off things that maybe some can't. And I can push some of the values, people, that heart piece that maybe other construction companies wouldn't even think about. And for me, I want our employees to know that we care about them and value them. And again, it's not about the job, but we're praying for their safety. I pray for the jobs we're pursuing are not just to go get a new, big, shiny project and take care of this customer. These are jobs for our families.

You know, we provide now for over 600 employees and families. Sometimes in construction, you can get very in an execution mode. We have all these activities to do on this deadline that has to happen. And sometimes the pleasantries can come out of that. And so how do you keep the human element that we have all these things to execute? How can I do it where you are valued and you are heard? And we're working as a team and we're collaborating instead of just, you know, yell and scream.

And that's going to motivate you, you know, looking at it in a different way. Like, you know, how do we honor our employees? And we're thoughtful in how we treat them and respect them and build them up, train them, invest in them, believe in them. So we do believe we invest in our people. We care for our people. They care for our customers. They make happy clients.

It's this whole, you know, cycle. And it's neat to see how God's just blessed those decisions when you look at financially of what are all the things we want to have better benefits than our competition and pay for full health insurance for our employees, pay for all of their training and invest in all these things that we celebrate and giveaways and fun. We're always, there's some employee of the month and we give a ton of stuff away. And we want it to be fun to work here and figure out how we connect individuals and challenge them to give back to their community and getting enrolled in our different kind of programs we do with charities.

And you get fun, but have folks think about like, gosh, God bless me. I'm an electrician at this company and I can get back to my community. There's a charity I can get passionate about.

I can give up my time, not just many. And if everybody thought that way, right, what a better community that we'd have, better city that we'd have. I'm so thankful for them for hiring me and putting me through school and teaching me the way, the way to go. I've been blessed to have the people in my life at Wayfield that I have, especially Carla, Brad, James, Pete. Just a bunch of great human beings here. They're like family. If I ever had any problem with anything, I'd be the first people I'd call.

So I know I can rely on them for anything. Since day one, Brad told me, I don't care what you've done, I care about what you want to do, where you want to go with your life from this moment forward. And I was like, wow, that's, you know, you get judged a lot based on what you do and whether it's negative or positive, you know, you just have to make the right choice. So, you know, I was, I was blessed to get the interview and get hired and just, I said, I'm going to take this one all the way. You know, being a recovering addict, you know, I was just miserable for years and years and was always unhappy and just after I got into Pier 1 and then I decided I'm not going to be miserable no more, I'm going to live life.

I feel that God wants me to be happy and just enjoy life. It's easy to be miserable and negative and grumpy and just, I don't want that no more. So I wake up every day and I'm happy just to wake up and have a great future at Wayfield.

It's amazing. I actually have seven years clean and sober. Most I've ever had in my life since I began my path down that road. I'm grateful to Wayfield. I'm going to give them 110% every day that I go to work. My dad once told me, if you're not early, you're late. So I show up early to work. They need me to stay late, I stay late. You need me to come in Saturday, I'm coming in Saturday.

And that's just how it is. I was blessed to get this opportunity to come have a career here. I'm going to give it my all. I'm going to stay with Wayfield until I retire and then probably until I die. I'm so happy where I'm at in my life. And, you know, there's other companies that are out there and, you know, you hear that a lot when you're in this trade.

You know, you see so many faces in construction and, oh, you're still at Wayfield, that's cool, blah, blah, blah. You should call and I'm like, I'm OK. I'm making the most money I've ever made in my life. I have a 401k. I'm good.

I'm buying my house. I don't need more money. I'm happy where I'm at. They pay me perfect. I'm OK. So I have no desire to go anywhere else. You could offer me twice as much money and I would. That's not about the money.

I'm comfortable in life where I'm at. And that's thanks to Wayfield Group. And great job to Robbie and to Alex for putting this piece together. And my goodness, it has so many of the elements that we care about here on this show. That authentic voice of the small business owner, her faith. Well, there it is for all to hear and what she does and all the good that got done because of her faith. And also, we heard from Kurt Anderson and his voice and my goodness, his honesty, his stark honesty about his life and how he lived it. And we love when people can come clean like that and talk about the turnaround in their lives. And there is hope in a story like this. And my goodness, it comes from so many different avenues that Pier One program was essential. Without it, well, Kurt couldn't have taken the next step. But then came, well, then came Carla and that hand, that helping hand and offering this man a job. And by the way, Carla and Wayfield Group have done this in the low hundreds of times, lending a helping hand and a job to these at-risk individuals.

And my goodness, a job at this company isn't just a J-O-B. It's hope, it's love, and my goodness, it's so much more. And what a thing for Kurt Anderson to experience was that kind of hope at a time when he needed it most.

And last but not least, there were just a couple of things that Kurt said that, well, really, really moved me. I've been blessed to have these people in my lives, he said of Wayfield Group. They're a bunch of great human beings.

And for anybody listening who owns a company, runs a business, or runs anything, you've got to be asking yourself, is that what your people are saying about you? He also said, I'm grateful to be here. I'll give 110% every day. I'll show up early to work. I'll stay late. If they need me on Saturday, I'm there. That's just the way it is.

And that's just the way it is. Wayfield Group, their story. Carla Nugent's story.

Also, Kurt Anderson's story, here on Our American Stories. Fall is just around the corner, and home is the center of it all. At Ashley, seasonal decorating's a breeze with their range of designs and materials. Snuggle up on a family-friendly sectional, or an ultra-modern sofa. Or gather outside and enjoy the crisp, cool air with a new fire pit or conversation set. From minor rooms to large rooms, the family-friendly sectional is just around the corner and home is the center of it all. Or gather outside and enjoy the crisp, cool air with a new fire pit or conversation set. From minor refreshes to total overhauls, Ashley has the essentials to make your home fall functional and fabulous.

Visit Ashley.com today. Want to get away, but still listen to your favorite radio stations and podcasts? Then listen up. iHeartRadio is now the onboard music partner on select Southwest flights. That means you can jam out to your favorite local radio station, even if you're flying coast to coast. Check out expertly curated stations that are perfect for kids and adults. Available on most domestic Southwest flights and perfect for a full non-stop or those pesky minutes between a movie ending and your plane touching down. So grab your headphones, raise your tray table, and relax with iHeartRadio and Southwest Airlines.