Short important lesson on starting your own recycling company.
We have 36 employees. We started with one truck driver / CEO / Accountant (me). At the beginning, 0% of our workforce was on drugs. Then, along the way, we rode through a period when the Vermont unemployment rate was below 4%, and we were still growing and not a high-paying company.
A certain number of unemployed people are toxic. Sorry, that's not heartless. It's just a given. Drug users tend to get fired and come looking for work elsewhere. If you are soft and "close one eye", they will wind up destroying your company and taking the other eight or ten jobs with them.
We are now at the point where we have "grown ups" in every department, people who don't have a monkey on their backs and who care about riff-raff getting into the place. Recycling and scrap businesses are still seen as a low barrier to entry, and we have to be wary.
But it all boils down to this: Not all liars are users, but virtually all users are liars. The more you become good at lying, the more pathological you become at it. I tried to stay friends with the drug crowd who were my friends after high school. But the temperature of the lying was rising.
