Mike Thibideau.

I’m Mike. I founded Brick by Brick Strategy, LLC, and I wrote Brick by Brick: Building a Working Life in Recovery.

I’ve spent my career in workforce development… building programs that help people who’ve been knocked off their path find work that lasts. People coming out of incarceration. Out of treatment. Out of long stretches of unemployment. The work has touched roughly 60,000 workers across a decade in central Indiana, with a 25% improvement in re-employment outcomes for the populations the programs are designed to serve. At the same time I use my love of data to help employers find people who thrive where they work.

I’m also a person in long-term recovery. Ten years, as of this book’s publication. I’ve had my own experiences with homelessness, with the work-after-treatment question, with starting over, with the slow and ordinary work of figuring out where work fits in a life rebuilt around recovery.

The credentials gave me access to the data and the systems. The personal road taught me what the data alone could not.

I’ve spoken on workforce and recovery at the White House, the Society for Human Resource Management, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the National Governors Association… and at smaller rooms that mattered more for being smaller. Church basements. Community college conference rooms. Shop-floor break rooms where the people doing the actual work were sitting.