Over the course of 21 years, Roberts, an ordained Methodist minister, has smitten Goodwill with the managerial equivalent of a mighty hand, a bare-knuckles application of entrepreneurial tactics that are foreign to most non-profits. The results: In 1997, Goodwill Industries-Manasota generated $8 million from 300,000 donations, covering its entire operating budget and even generating a surplus that it invested in additional services. Roberts has expanded Goodwill into three other counties, and fellow do-gooders from Lafayette, Louisiana, to American Samoa are imitating his model. More important, the organization is succeeding at its main calling. Capitalizing on connections Roberts has forged with the mainstream business community, Goodwill trained and placed 491 people into jobs last year.
Things have gone so well that Roberts wants to convert Goodwill from a charity to a "human services delivery vehicle" with the profile and credibility of McDonald's. He envisions a chain of centers where shoppers can peruse merchandise, the needy will utilize a broad range of social programs, and neighborhood groups can hold meetings after hours. "We want to be in your neighborhood," he says. "When you need marriage enrichment or a job, when you need help with your parenting skills or with getting your head screwed on straight about your career, we want you to stop in at the friendly, convenient store of human services called Goodwill Industries, and these nice people will help you make a difference in your life, and we'll do it for free."
Roberts, 54, is big and gregarious, with a Texas twang in his voice and a down-home manner that's equal parts pulpit and saloon. He's completely at ease, for instance, quoting Scripture one minute and discussing White House dalliances the next. He dispenses his ideas and philosophies like a back-porch guru.
On the one hand, he takes care to preserve the familial, modest Goodwill culture: For the organization's annual Distinguished Citizens Banquet in March, he chose a menu of meat loaf, mashed potatoes, collard greens and gravy. On the other, Roberts moves easily in the dominions of the area's power brokers: He says the morning prayers at meetings of the Sarasota County Commission (he has no official congregation, but guest-preaches frequently), and he serves as the only not-for-profit member of the board of directors of the Argus Foundation, a group of Sarasota County's most conservative and influential business people. "He has the ability to cut through the debate of type-A personalities, which we have a lot of around here," says Argus Foundation Executive Director Kerry Kirschner.
Broken toasters
When Roberts took over at Goodwill Industries-Manasota in 1977, he confronted an organization that was tired, inefficient and ineffective. Charitable citizens dropped off their broken toasters, old vacuum cleaners and worn-out clothes at any of 150 free-standing receptacles serviced by a fleet of trucks and drivers, who transported the donations to a facility near the Sarasota-Bradenton Airport. There, Goodwill's clients - the disabled, welfare cases and others hard to employ - sorted the clothes and learned how to fix the toasters and other mechanical items. Goods were then trucked to Goodwill's retail store in downtown Sarasota, where they were sold back into the community.
But sales didn't come close to covering transportation and other operating expenses. Government contracts for vocational rehabilitation were an additional financial drain because job-training costs exceeded what the government paid. Goodwill frequently had to petition the state and United Way to cover its debts.
Roberts' response was classic private sector turnaround strategy. He acted to stem the financial losses, canceling the government contracts and firing 50 full-time employees, about two-thirds of Goodwill-Manasota's work force. He also began marketing Goodwill aggressively to the community. "The for-profit people have learned that if you want customers, you have to go get 'em. Your movie theater has got to be attractive, convenient, and you have got to give parking," says Roberts. "The problem is, the resources do not chase the customer in the not-for-profit sector. The resources sit there waiting for the customers to chase them."
In 1978, armed with a $75,000 grant, he replaced the 150 collection boxes with 10 portable trailers placed at locations of high consumer traffic. This cut transportation costs and enabled Goodwill to better track donations. But by 1983, sales hit a plateau which no tinkering could elevate. Perplexed, Roberts crunched some numbers. He discovered that for every donor, Goodwill sold $10 worth of merchandise, year in and year out, regardless of marketing strategy or retail price. "I began to go, 'Wait a minute, we're not in the retail business. We're in the donor business,'" he says. "We and the banks are driven by the same thing: If we don't get the deposits, we're out of business."
The obvious answer to Roberts was to cater to donors. So he began moving Goodwill from an operation with one store and separate collection locations to a chain of inviting retail stores, each with a place for donors to give and shoppers to buy. Roberts wants visitors who see the trademark blue-and-white logo out front to know they're entering an establishment that's as clean and friendly as the local Publix, a role model for Roberts.
Using financial leverage, Roberts began building the chain. To finance a second permanent retail location in 1985, Goodwill secured a $1 million bank loan by pledging the sorting facility as collateral. The new store eventually generated enough sales to enable Roberts to mortgage that building to buy another, and so on. Today, Goodwill-Manasota operates 25 stores in Sarasota, Manatee, DeSoto and Hardee counties. "This is a man who practices finance, marketing, sales and general management of the level that you find in a major corporation," says Charles Murphy, CEO of SouthTrust Bank, Sarasota.
Roberts also changed the way Goodwill trains workers for jobs, focusing on basic job skills and attitudes rather than small appliance repair and other activities for which the real world has little demand. He also linked Goodwill with the area's employers: Thanks to those connections, Roberts knows which company needs to fill what vacancies. Goodwill trains everybody from janitors to bank tellers to CEOs of other non-profits, including Girls Inc.
'The 7-11 of human services'
Two years ago, when Roberts heard that Congress was considering welfare reform legislation that would force welfare recipients into the workplace, he formed a team headed by one-time U.S. Senator Marlow Cook from Kentucky and joined representatives from Lafayette, La., to lobby lawmakers for funding.
Goodwill's self-sustenance impressed the Welfare-to-Work law sponsors, who awarded the two groups a $10 million grant last July. Flush with its $7 million share, Goodwill Industries-Manasota is set to double the number of stores in Sarasota and Manatee counties in the next three years. The revenue they generate will finance programs such as GoodCare, a day-care program, and GoodSchool, which educates people suffering from dyslexia and attention deficit disorder. "We want to be the 7-11 of human services," Roberts says.
On April 2nd, the first new GoodNeighbor Center (as its stores have been rechristened) opened at a busy intersection in south Sarasota. Flower beds take the edge off the building's boxy design, and atop three flagpoles flap the banners of nation, state and community. All manner of human-service resources percolates inside. As another new feature, each store's signage will bear the name of a prominent contributor, in this case Cook and his wife, Nancy.
Meanwhile, six more Goodwill organizations are petitioning Washington for seed capital. "We have got to change the corporate culture of the not-for-profit sector, making it much more friendly, and that is what we're attempting to do," Roberts says. "My personal vision is, Goodwill will be the leaven in the neighborhood loaf."
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO DON:
Rev. Don Roberts has made himself as much a businessman as a preacher in the course of resuscitating Goodwill Industries-Manasota, and he is known in his community for liberally sharing his views on life and society. A sampler:
On education: "We basically are fed a bunch of lies when we're children. Number one, that there's such a thing as a right answer. The second one is, there's such a thing as 100%. The third thing is, it's cheating to collaborate. You get out and you find that there are very few right answers; there's a bunch of grey. There's no 100%; if you're lucky, you make 51, 52% in life, and you're doing good. And number three, the best way to live life is to collaborate, to look over each other's shoulders, to steal generously from one another. And we wonder why our children are confused."
On maintaining perspective: "My own personal kind of saying is, 'You can't be right and in relationship at the same time.' So, if you come at a story from the place of being right, that there's this kind of right answer - and theologians are the worst about that, them and Republicans and Democrats - the minute you start having the right answer, you can no longer be in relationship, and the moment you can no longer be in relationship, you no longer have the right answer."
On individual success: "There's a myth in America about the self-made man. It's a myth, in the sense that there's some truth to it like all myths are true, but in some sense all myths are false. The false part about that is that we're not self-made. There are teachers and parents, there are taxpayers who build institutions of learning and support."
On family: "In the late '40s, a guy came along by the name of Levitt, in New York, and that was a watershed event in American culture. Up until that time, you had America, which was a community of neighborhoods. All of a sudden, we took all the intimacies of the neighborhood and began to disassemble them. We took the American family and we did a very interesting thing to it: Dad would get up in the morning from Levittown, and he would go back into his factory in downtown Manhattan. Mom would stay at her factory, called the house. And then we built all these schools in the middle of the new neighborhoods, the suburbs, these factories where you pump in a kindergartener on one end and a Ph.D. on the other. We send Mom to one factory, Dad to another factory, and the kids to another factory, and the American family went to hell in a handbasket. Are we surprised?"
On social programs: "The state of Florida has all these services for people, but they don't have an advertising budget, so they can't tell you that they have this service that's waiting for you. So the guy sits behind his desk all day going, 'I'm ready to serve you,' but you never show up, because we've never told you that the service is available. So you pay the dollars to the guy to sit there and not perform the service because you won't allow him to tell us because you say it's a waste of taxpayers' dollars to market and advertise. That's dumb."