Building Second Chances: Sean Stegeman's and Lee Loveall's CMC Journey

Roger Faulkner is the reason this conversation happened. A few years ago, when I was just out of prison and trying to figure out what was next, Roger asked to meet up. We met at a restaurant, he said tell me your story, I told him, and he said great, that’s all I wanted to hear. That’s just how Roger is. So when he reached out a few weeks ago and told me about a guy named Sean Stegeman and a company called CMC, Creative Modular Construction, down in Springfield, Missouri, I paid attention. Springfield’s my old stomping grounds growing up, and Roger doesn’t waste my time.

Sean is 40 years old, from a town just outside Springfield, and he runs alongside Lee Loveall at a company that now has over 187 men and women working in reentry, doing fabrication and installation for 7 Brew Coffee. That’s a national chain, kind of like Starbucks. But before any of that, Sean was a kid whose parents divorced when he was in second grade, with a dad who was an alcoholic and in and out of AA, and a mom who worked night shifts at a factory for 20 years until they shut it down.

The Role Models Who Shaped Him

Sean told me his stepfather came into the picture when he was in fourth grade and was gone by his freshman year of high school. That guy was the only person who tried to teach him work habits, who prayed with him and his brother, who talked about the Lord. Sean said it stuck with him later, even though at the time he was already heading somewhere else.

The other model was a man he called an uncle, his best friend’s dad. An outlaw biker who owned a business and didn’t take crap from anybody. “What a man was supposed to be in my eyes at the time,” Sean told me. He took a little bit from each of these men and built an identity on top of it. His words: “My pride, myself, selfish ambitions, tried to build up a reputation or an identity in these things that really were founded on nothing and just crumbled.”

He didn’t fit in at school. Wasn’t athletic, wasn’t popular, didn’t have nice clothes. So he found the kids who’d skip school and smoke weed, and that was freshman year. He stopped going to school and got sent to a juvenile boot camp called Show Me Challenge at Camp Nevada, where he got his GED. He was planning to go into the military from there.

The Wreck That Changed the Direction

Right after he graduated from Show Me Challenge, Sean got into a drunk-driving wreck with his best friend Zach. Zach was 15. Zach lost his life.

Sean was 17. The charge was involuntary vehicular manslaughter and they gave him a five-year sentence. He did two and a half years on it. That was his first time in prison.

He said something about the period right before that crash that stuck with me. He told me he honestly believed he was invincible. He’d hear about tragic things happening to other people and figure he was somehow favored, that nothing like that would touch him. Then it did.

He walked his parole down clean after he got out at 21. Got a job. Started a residential tree business with his brother, trimming trees in power lines on weekends. Met his ex-wife. Started having kids. And underneath all of that he kept partying on weekends and living what he called a double life.

How It Got Dark

Sean made it to 33 before he went back. The progression he described was specific: drinking, then pills, then a stretch with heroin and ecstasy, then meth. And when meth came in, something else came with it.

“It opened the door for a spiritual darkness and experience that changed me,” he told me.

His wife eventually had restraining orders on him. He picked up a stalking charge, which in Missouri is what you get when you violate a restraining order three times, essentially excessive phone calls. Then a separate assault charge. By the time he landed in Cole County jail, he was facing a 25-year sentence at 85 percent, plus other charges strung out across three different judges. His wife was gone. They had four kids. His youngest was seven months old and didn’t know him.

He told me he’d been trying to take his life and couldn’t even do that. He was too scared. And there was a Gideon Bible in his cell that he kept trying to cover up because the blue cover felt like it was beaming at him.

Reading Proverbs in a Cell

What Sean did next, he did alone. Nobody walked him through it. He’d already shut down a guy who tried to tell him about Jesus. He said, in his own words, that he told the Lord: “I’m going to read this Bible one time. I’ll read the whole thing. And you got to do something. If you don’t show me something, I’m taking my life.”

He opened to Proverbs because the one thing he knew about the Bible was that Solomon was supposed to be wise. He figured he’d strategically pull out some tips. Instead, he said, it convicted him of being a fool. He cried himself to sleep, and when he woke up, his face wasn’t stuck in a frown anymore. He couldn’t stop smiling. He read the whole Bible in under 40 days.

He got a five-year sentence with all his cases rolled into one and did two years on it. While he was inside, he stopped talking. He told me everything that came out of his mouth had been some kind of fabrication, either glorifying things he shouldn’t have or playing the victim. So he journaled. He went to a long-term treatment program at OCC. He became a prison chaplain.

And he wrote a letter to a guy named John Stroop, who runs Freeway Ministry in Springfield. Sean didn’t know John personally, but he knew of him. John had come out of Jeff City, same path Sean had been on, and built a recovery ministry in Springfield. Sean read his book, Pit to the Pulpit.

The plan in Sean’s head was to go back to Jeff City and try to win his family back. He told me his ex-wife had moved on, but he couldn’t picture going anywhere else. Then he got subpoenaed for the divorce, which closed that door. Three days later, an acceptance letter from Freeway Ministry showed up. Sean had never filled out an application.

Landing in Springfield

Freeway took him to a house in Marshfield first. He got a part-time job at Mom’s Kitchen cooking. He wasn’t trying to make money. He was trying to learn what real authority and leadership looked like, since he’d spent his whole life leading people the wrong way.

Then COVID hit. Mom’s Kitchen shut down. The same day he lost his job, the Freeway director called and asked him to come lead the main house in Springfield. He took it. Three new guys came straight out of Green County jail into the house two days after him, looking to him for guidance. He told me he didn’t know what he was doing. He was acting like he did.

That’s when the director told him about a custom sheet metal shop, Architectural Design Concepts, that had reached out looking for workers. Sean went down to interview. That’s where Lee Loveall comes in, and that’s where CMC, the company that now employs over 187 people in reentry building 7 Brew Coffee stands, started to take shape for him.

We’ll get into the build with Lee next. For now, what I keep coming back to is the line Sean used about himself before any of this started: he’d been bought by the world without even noticing. The work he’s doing in Springfield now, helping other guys come out of prison and into a paycheck and a place to live, came out of him finally figuring out what he’d been hiding behind. A job. A reputation. A nice truck. Things that don’t hold up when the rest of it falls.

If you’ve been around the reentry world, you already know how rare what Sean and Lee are doing actually is.