By day, she installs joint sealants. By night, she ministers to the jobless via the Internet.

by Beth Ellen . photo by Matt Rose

To Janet Webb, every person has a unique and sacred story. Webb herself is no exception, and her story is quite unique. The 53-year-old MBA started up a construction firm in February, JL Webb & Company, LLC. Working with mostly federal contracts, she and around ten employees spend their days caulking and waterproofing commercial buildings around the region. In her free time, though, Webb leads a not-so-secret double life as a chaplain reaching out to the jobless through an online ministry.

Earlier this year, the federal government announced it would guarantee five percent of federal prime contracts in certain business categories to women-owned businesses. Webb, who had worked in operations management at UPS and as an engineering manager at Carolina Freight Corporation, knew a good business opportunity when she saw one. (The government has always guaranteed a certain percentage of contracts to minority-owned businesses, but not specifically to women.) She and her team are a HUB-certified Division 7 Construction company, and so far, even in a downturn, they’ve found plenty of work. “I know how to run companies,” she says. “I just got started with [this company] one step at a time.”

But Webb hasn’t always been hard-nosed, nor has her career path been clear. In the mid-‘90s, Carolina Freight Corporation was bought by another company, and Webb would have been forced to relocate from her Western North Carolina home to Fort Smith, Arkansas. She simply wasn’t willing to transfer. Going through a divorce at the time, Webb didn’t want to leave her children behind. She ended up at Avery Express in East Tennessee, and her high-school-age daughter stayed mainly with Webb’s ex-husband. Her son, then 6, stayed with her. “It just killed me,” she says. “My family was split up. For what? Just for me to have a job. I thought: This is what life is about?”

So she started reinventing herself. At 43, after spending time soul-searching, she put herself through both an MBA program and divinity school at Gardner-Webb University, near her home in Boiling Springs. She started Spiritual Care Services shortly after divinity school in 2005. She does not accept payment for most of her spiritual teleconferencing, though she recently presented theories on integrating technology and spiritual care at a conference of the American TeleMedicine Association. “I know what physical pain is. I’ve broken my neck and my leg before.. but there’s nothing like spiritual pain, and I just want to help people be released from it,” she says. She is particularly interested in helping the jobless, since her own jobless periods were serious reckonings. These days, being a successful entrepreneur seems to offer a convincing message of hope. “If you have something you want to do…go for it,” she says. “Don’t let money stand in your way.”

For more, check out www.theinternetchaplain.org.