Pablo Martinez at work in Carlos Shoe Repair Shop in Martinez, Calif.

Those looking for a job doing something that improves the environment, helps people save money and won’t be outsourced to India might want to consider learning how to repair shoes.

Particularly in these recessionary times when people want to recycle and reuse, the shoe repair business is booming, and there seems to be a lot of opportunities available. 

Learning to fix shoes, however, is a true skilled trade and takes months of training, either as an apprentice or as a student at one of two recently created cobbler schools – one in the San Francisco Bay Area and the other in Denver.

Although it takes effort, there are jobs for those who learn. “I get calls from all over looking for people who can do this. We had a call from a St. Louis shop that was looking for someone and wanted to pay $36,000 per year plus benefits,” says Tom Rhine, who created Rhine’s Cobbler School in Denver to teach his trade.

His school is a 10-month program, but students can take smaller segments if they just want to learn one aspect. He teaches how to use the tools, nails, adhesives and equipment; how to repair rips and replace soles and zippers. He also teaches sales skills and how to run the business –  just about everything one would need to know to operate a shop like his. For the entire program he charges $5,000.

In Martinez, Calif., about 35 miles northeast of San Francisco, Pablo Martinez is creating the Carlos Cobbler School. He says he sees a real need for more people versed in shoe repair and knows of at least 20 shops in the Bay Area that are looking for employees.

Martinez is currently setting up the classes, which will include a shoemaking and sandal making class, as well as instruction in how to repair shoes. He’s working on a schedule for the classes, which are expected to start this spring but hasn’t decided how much he will charge yet.

In the meantime, he also has apprenticeships that require a seven-month commitment in which he will teach two apprentices at a time the trade without charge. 

For those with no funds or who don’t want to relocated to Denver or the San Francisco Bay Area, another option is to find a cobbler who wants to take on an apprentice. The Shoe Service Institute of America, the organization for people who repair shoes, suggests doing this.

All SSIA member wholesalers – companies that sell supplies to shoe repair shops – know who might be close to retiring or who might want to take on an apprentice. These companies are not everywhere, but many of them do regional or national business. A list can be found at http://www.ssia.info/industry/wholesalers.asp

And once trained, you may either stay and work for the place that offered you an apprenticeship, find a job with one of the owner’s contacts or start to think about saving up, or finding a partner, to start your own shoe repair shop. But that will cost somewhere between $40,000 and $75,000, depending on whether you buy new or used machinery. Or maybe, if the person you’re apprenticing for is ready to retire, he will turn the business over to you and let you pay him from your earnings. One repair shop owner said a shoe repair business could make up to $100,000 per year.

For more information on the Rhine Cobbler School visit www.rhinescobblerschool.com or contact them by phone at 303-832-6345. 

Carlos Cobbler School will soon have a website at www.shoerepairschool.com. In the meantime, you can contact him at 925-228-6232.

Fabian Ruiz launched Infor-Nation Corp. after participating in Defy Ventures entrepreneurship program.

Not much more than a year ago Fabian Ruiz was in prison serving 21 years for killing the man who shot his older brother. Today he is an entrepreneur and founder of Infor-nation Corp., a company that provides Internet services to those still inside.

From committing a major crime at age 16 to creating a company was a long, circuitous journey, but Ruiz’s story shows that with determination and a little help along the way people who’ve been incarcerated can make it.

During his stay in prison, Ruiz participated in a variety of programs and earned his AA degree. After finishing the college program, he studied to become a paralegal by taking correspondent courses through Blackstone Career Institute and spent the next decade working as a paralegal in the law libraries of various prisons.

It was through working as an in-prison paralegal that he got the inspiration for his business. “The Internet was very useful for me, but in NY prisons there’s no Internet access,” Ruiz says.

“I was fortunate that I had family and friends who I corresponded with and had them go online and look for info for me in places like LexisNexis. That info was pretty valuable, and I always had an idea in the back of my mind that if they won’t let the Internet in, I would create a business facilitating that service for prisoners.

Joining Defy Ventures

When he was released from prison in 2011 Internet access was still not available to prisoners in New York prisons, and no one had started a service to cater to inmates who needed to search for things online.

At the same time, a friend told him about Defy Ventures, a New York City organization that helps a select group of formerly incarcerated individuals learn how to become entrepreneurs. Defy Ventures was founded by Catherine Rohr, who also created the Prison Entrepreneurship Program at the Cleveland State Prison in Texas.

Ruiz decided to apply for the Defy Ventures program, and after an information session and screening process, he was selected to be one of 100 participants in the organization’s first class.

Following a 45-day introductory training program during evenings and weekends, he was among the 50 participants chosen for an internship, in which professional mentors and trainers coach participants as they prepare to launch their own businesses.

At the end of the first six months – Defy Ventures is a yearlong program – Ruiz participated in various competitions in which he had to present business pitches and business plans. The people who win these contests, and those who the organization’s investors are confident can succeed, go into Defy Venture’s business incubator. Ruiz was one of only nine members from his class who made it that far.

“In the incubator, you start the business, and Defy Ventures provides different services like lawyers who formulate contracts and people who do marketing and website assistance,” Ruiz says. It also provided a mentor to work with Ruiz, and he was fortunate that his mentor is the COO of a multimillion-dollar hedge fund.

“He (my mentor) would come to class and see what we were learning, and then we’d have an hour to talk about things. Then we’d have meetings at his office and figure out how to get my financials together,” Ruiz says. “We would go on picnics with Defy, and it developed into a pretty good relationship.”

The final phase

The last phase of the class was to incorporate. Ruiz incorporated his business, Infor-nation Corp., in June but didn’t actually start the business until August.

Infor-nation Corp. offers remote Internet search, remote email management and remote Facebook management, charging a set fee for each service.

He used the $2,000 in grant money he received from winning a Defy Ventures business competition to print and distribute the company’s initial brochures to inmates in prisons, who then fill out their info and what they’d like to have done. He began with four New York prisons, but the New York State prison system did not allow him to provide email and Facebook services.

Ruiz is now looking to expand into New Jersey and has contacted 17 correctional facilities in that state. New Jersey doesn’t seem to have a problem with email or Facebook, so he will be able to offer his full range of services in prisons there.

At this point. Ruiz is working on Infor-nation part time while also being employed part time as a paralegal for a group of criminal trial attorneys.

What’s the most important thing he learned from the whole experience? “You can’t do it on your own. I’ve always been the type of person who tries to do everything on their own, never asks for help,” he says.

“There are different phases in Defy Ventures that concentrate on hard skills and soft skills. They teach textbook stuff and find out which kinds of characteristics you have that are strong and which are weak. It was doing those things that I realized I have to break out of old patterns and do new things to get results.”

To find out more, visit:

https://www.facebook.com/InforNationCorp/?hc_ref=PAGES_TIMELINE

www.defyventures.org

Angela McCray (center) with the first ReMADE class (left to right): Mary, June, Chloe and Mahnani.

With so many barriers to employment, many ex-offenders find that starting their own business provides a better option than working for someone else. While entrepreneurship has its own challenges, those with creative ideas and determination can succeed, perhaps with a little help from programs like the one created by Stanford Law School student Angela McCray to help female ex-offenders get a head start.

McCray launched Project ReMADE, which stands for Rentry: Making a Difference Through Entrepreneurship, early this year. An MBA, CPA and a member of a family of entrepreneurs, McCray was inspired by a corrections class she took at Stanford. In a paper she wrote for the class on how to reduce the recidivism rate, she proposed a program to help entrepreneurial ex-offenders, and the endeavor developed from there.

Project ReMADE consists of weekly meetings, which alternate traditional classroom training in such business skills as marketing, accounting and how to get funding with meetings with mentors. Each participant is matched with a law student, a business student and a member of the business community who help her put together a business plan.

McCray also recruited students to teach workshops and act as mentors and worked with the San Francisco Reentry Council to locate potential clients. Five were chosen for the initial 12-week program, but one later dropped out.

Participants must have a high school diploma or GED, have been out of prison or jail for at least one year and be working or in school.

The program is just the beginning of the process. “We focus on giving participants the social capital they need and a framework and a mentor so that they can work more fully with their plan and their ideas,” McCray says. “They can’t develop a business in 12 weeks.”

They do develop a business plan, however, and that plan is formally presented before a panel of representatives from organizations including Working Solutions, the Small Business Development Center and Renaissance Entrepreneurship Center. “Our goal is to connect them with the organizations that can help them carry on from there,” McCray adds.

The first class of entrepreneurial women established plans for a creative design company, an event planning firm, a clothing line for the LGBT market and a supplier of domestic services that range from cleaning to closet organization.

McCray plans to start recruiting the next batch of five future entrepreneurs in the fall, when classes at Stanford resume.

Georgia Tech MBA student Kristen Daniel is the founder of The Pentorship Program.

Kristen Daniel, an MBA student at Georgia Tech, has created a unique organization to inspire inmates to think about becoming entrepreneurs upon their release.

The Pentorship Program, a startup nonprofit, aims to pair inmates with entrepreneurs, who communicate by email and physical mail through the organization’s staff.

So-called pentees must have a GED or high school diploma or be enrolled in the GED program at their facility. They must have an interest in a specific business idea or invention and have no internal prison/jail gang affiliation. Pentors must be an entrepreneur, with an organization or business of any size that has been in existence for at least 18 months. They must have no prior convictions for illegal business activity and be committed to responding to their inmate pentee in a timely manner.

Daniel first became interested in prisons and prisoners her senior year in college when she wrote a paper about privatizing the prison industry. After two years of work following college, she took off on a long journey teaching English in Chile and Korea. During her travels she saw endless examples of entrepreneurship among families who had little access to education and were economically disadvantaged but had the drive to start businesses, no matter how small.

Upon her return a friend was arrested on drug charges. Daniel told him about her plans to start an organization to encourage inmates to think about entrepreneurship, and he told his cellmates what she was doing. They began asking questions about the types of business they wanted to start after their release, and The Pentorship Program was born.

The going has been a bit slow during the organization’s first year-plus, but Daniel is laying the foundation to expand the program’s operations. The Georgia Department of Corrections is interested but was going through organizational changes. “Now that they have more job placement programs in place, they want me to come and do a rollout of the program,” she says.

She also is looking for an entrepreneurship organization to partner with, possibly SCORE, which has been doing email mentoring for a long time and has started a program for veterans. She also hopes to expand it nationally and that The Pentorship Program will serve as a model that others can adopt for their own areas.

In the meantime, her work progresses in Georgia, where one out of 13 citizens is incarcerated, on parole or on probation. And because it’s so difficult for ex-offenders to gain employment, she believes that entrepreneurship is something that those who have an interest should consider.

As she says on her website, “Entrepreneurship is the great equalizer that, if pursued correctly, allows individuals the opportunity to pursue the American dream regardless of race, gender, socio-economic background and past criminal history.”

It’s a path that many, with encouragement from programs like hers, may choose to follow. For more information on The Pentorship Program, visit www.thepentorship.org.