Located on the scenic Olympic Peninsula about an hour north of Seattle, WA, Gray Wolf Ranch, a treatment center with a substantial wilderness bent founded nine years ago by recovering entrepreneur Peter Boeschenstein, provides the ideal recovery environment for its youthful clients.

In that time, the center has grown from just 12 beds on 5 acres to 28 beds on 20 acres, with 14 sober living beds in Port Townsend, the nearest town. But Port Townsend is small, with a population of just 10,000, and offers limited employment opportunities for clients that graduate from Gray Wolf. “Like many treatment centers around the country, many of our graduates elect to stay in the area, preferring to start their recovery in a location that is removed from the people, places and things at home,” says Boeschenstein, who invested nearly $1.5 million to build Gray Wolf after receiving his clinical training at Hazelden in Minnesota. “But finding jobs here locally is not easy. So, after some thought, I decided I would do something about it.” Taking a page out of the Goodwill Industries play book, and other such ventures where businesses have been created to help employ special targeted populations, Boeschenstein decided to found an enterprise whose principal purpose would be to create a self-perpetuating source of jobs for his recovering clients.

After scouting around, he decided to buy an established print screening business from a local woman who had run the operation from her house, paying about $200,000 for an enterprise with 500 clients. “What attracted me to the screen printing business was that it required a diverse array of talents - everything from computers, to artistry and retail - that would provide a relatively broad array of job choices for the guys in our sober living community,” said Boeschenstein.

With much of its existing client base in the Port Townsend area, Boeschenstein decided a local storefront would be appropriate, so he bought a building and moved the business to downtown Port Townsend, naming it BADd Habit.

In its first year of operation, sales are up 70 percent to around $325,000, with the business now employing between 5 and 7 people at any given time. “While our sales have risen very sharply, its important to understand that the overhead is now 3 times what it was before I bought the business,” said Boeshenstein. “We invested a lot of money in rehabbing the building and also into building a first rate website.”

Boeshenstein predicts the business will break even in 2006, but after that profits will start to roll in, most of which will be donated to a non-profit entity that has been set up to award treatment scholarships for those who cannot afford to pay. “Any profits, after salaries and expenses, go to the 4806 Foundation that provides scholarships to men and women for treatment in the early stages of alcohol and drug abuse,” says Melissa Davis, Boeschenstein’s operations manager at BADd Habit, adding that sales have almost doubled because the company has substantially boosted service and quality.

So far the vast majority of BADd Habit’s sales are in the local Port Townsend area, where the company is pretty much the only game in town for businesses and schools that want logo apparel items. But a very key area that Boeschenstein is targeting for growth is the treatment center arena, where he is already selling print screened clothing to some of the nation’s top addiction treatment enterprises.

“This is obviously a strong avenue for us to seek growth for the business, to diversify away from just selling locally” says Boeschenstein. “We think we have a strong pitch to the treatment community and very top quality products.” Already such well known players as the Caron Foundation and the high-end Cirque Lodge are buying logo apparel from BADd Habit, and Boeschenstein expects to sign more contracts soon. And if BADd Habit continues to operate successfully as it has, Boeschenstein would seriously consider expanding operations to other areas of the country, mainly to locations with many treatment centers nearby. PD