Kempner: Falcons stadium and the business of giving second chances


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Starting a new business is usually brutally hard. Brian Preston made it even harder by hiring homeless guys and recovering drug addicts to make hand-crafted furniture.

But, hey, Preston is a guy who believes in second chances.

That’s turning out to be a good thing now that he and his crew are about to start on their most lucrative deal: Making about 120 tables for the Atlanta Falcon’s new Mercedes-Benz Stadium.

The wood and steel tables — rugged ones that you can stand beside while scarfing down a pizza or a pitcher with friends — will be salted around the general admission concourses. They’re supposed to bring a little human scale and warmth to place that might otherwise seem cold and concrete.

Come to think of it, that’s what Preston had in mind all along for his Douglasville business: Adding a weathered, human-scale to the business of furniture and maybe helping people reclaim their lives in the process.

The business called Lamon Luther — the name of one of his grandfathers — began with something Preston's wife saw on Pinterest. It was a bench made from a wooden pallet. She asked her husband to build one.

Then friends asked for some. Preston had an epiphany: He would build and sell hand-crafted furniture from reclaimed wood (cause that’s a thing now), and he would create jobs for a couple of the homeless guys living in an tent camp near Douglasville. (He had volunteered there with the church where he worked on staff.)

“Consumers are interested in how products are making a difference in the world,” Preston told me. “I said we are going to use the free enterprise system for good. We will make beautiful products and help people by doing it.”

That sounds pretty. But Preston was on the financial mend himself. The recession had killed his homebuilding company, which had ten employees. He and his wife had filed for bankruptcy protection, he told me. They lost their house and car. And they had a newborn baby.

“Poverty became real for me,” said Preston, now 34.

He worked at a church for awhile, but left to pursue the furniture idea.

It would be nice to tell you the business instantly took off. It did not.

Preston had no formal business plan and no cash reserves. Not smart, he told me. He lost money the first two years in business.

He knew, of course, that every morning he’d need to pick up the homeless guys he employed. Some no longer had a valid driver’s license. Some couldn’t balance a checkbook. Preston came to believe some also struggled with mental health issues that could make the work environment tense and volatile.

He now has 10 full-time employees. Among them, he said, are 22 felony convictions.

“Our whole workforce has been affected by homelessness and addiction in some way,” Preston said.

Scott Porter told me he lost his home after getting into drugs. He ended up with two drug possession convictions and spent nights at the homes of friends or family or, sometimes, sleeping in his car. Eventually, he went through not one, but two rehab programs. He’s got a steady job now with Preston, and he’s getting married this weekend.

Other employers had been resistant to hire him.

“I’ve changed my life, but they still see what they see from my past,” he told me.

Lots of people need jobs. Who has the guts to hire someone with criminal convictions?

Preston does. He tries to be careful. He looks for people now who’ve gone through a program to gain job and life skills. And every Monday morning, the crew gathers over breakfast to talk about their personal highs and lows. It’s a way to bond and counsel each other, Preston told me. He gets employees who are grateful for the chance to work.

The business grew as Preston spread the word on social media and talked about giving people a hand up, not a hand out. Chick-fil-A ordered crates for a special event. The Krog Street Market and intown restaurants bought tables. Among the best sellers is a seven-foot farm table and benches that go for $1,500.

Donna Childs, who lives in the Douglasville area, spotted some of the work and liked the quality and the mission behind it.

It happens that she’s a principal with tvsdesign, a design firm which is working on the Falcon’s new 71,000-seat stadium. So she helped bring the table designs and backstory to the attention of Falcons executives and team owner Arthur Blank and his family.

“They love the message and what it stands for,” Childs said.

The project will keep Preston’s crew busy for four months starting this summer, and will allow him to hire three more workers.

Postscript: Preston is starting a small non-profit (the Lamon Luther Foundation) that he said will raise money to buy a duplex to house eight to ten workers, who would pay a subsidized rent. He's launched an online fundraiser with a tiny house as a raffle prize to be given away Tuesday. More information is available at http://www.tinyhousegiveaway.co/