America's Family

America's Family is a dynamic fusion of social benefit, entrepreneurial principles, and intense collaboration. When Steve founded America's Family back in 2002, it grew out of the belief that if you treated your low-wage employees like family (by offering them unheard of benefits for their positions) they would give you more productivity. This was proven in a study by the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, after studying several of Steve's McDonald's stores, they noted a 120% drop in turnover, and a nearly 3% rise in profits. Today, America's Family provides small loans to working families to help get them through a crisis. They provide the counseling and collaborative connections to get families the help they need so they can get to work. America's Family is taking on the payday lending industry by offering an alternative that costs less than 10% of what a payday loan advance would cost a working poor person. Their mission: financial stability for every working poor family in America.

I3CMS in Action (from The Box You Got, by Steve Bigari)


It is no secret that fast-food restaurants rely on workers who can quickly learn a simple model of food “production.” Because of the relatively low cost of labor, most fast food restaurants have high turnover, 200 to 400 percent per year. Building a good team is hard work; these dynamics make it nearly impossible. It’s not uncommon for people to start work and then quit after seeing the size of their first paycheck. “I can get more money on welfare,” is what many of them tell us. That kind of turnover was unacceptable to me, so I started looking for the roots of this problem. What I found is no surprise. Those 39 million working poor Americans need the same things we all do: healthcare, transportation, financial planning, housing, computer skills, loans, education, and opportunities for advancement. The difference is that our economy doesn’t reward a person for having a low-skill job, bad credit, and no education. The result is a system that spits out lots of people pursuing the American dream in a game that’s rigged against them. Realizing that these motivations are common to all of us, I set out to find a way that I, as a fast-food franchisee, could do my part to help my employees have a better quality of life.

I did a couple of studies when I started America’s Family. I considered raising prices to provide what my employees needed, but I would have had to raise prices 400 percent—and I would have lost all my customers. Or I could have given up everything I made, but then my staff would get less than a 50 cent raise. Really—I took every dime I was making and said, “What if I do this work for free?” In reality, who would take millions of dollars worth of risk and work 70-hour weeks for free? Neither idea was practical or fun! I had the inspiration. I only required the instigation and innovation. I had a heart for these folks but no way to solve the problem myself. I knew I needed help from the entire community. From this inspiration American’s Family was born.