001 - The Autism Advantage: Lessons from Building a Successful Autism Enterprise
Release Date: 08/12/2016
Lessons From the Trenches – A Follow up conversation with Brewability Labs
Autism Advantage
Brewability Lab has been open for just over a year. Tiffany’s employees have experienced incredible growth since then, thanks in large part to the systems she has set up to facilitate the process. For example, there are braille labels on the bar taps so that a bartender who is blind can function at his best.
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Diversifying Impact – A Follow up conversation with the Chocolate Spectrum
Autism Advantage
Since our last conversation, there has been a huge change in the training side of things. Valerie Herskowitz explains that she has mostly just gone with the flow with the business, following the opportunities that presented themselves, instead of having a huge long-term master plan. She explains in this conversation that it occurred to her that they should see if the coffee industry could possibly be something that would work for individuals with autism.
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Growing Smart – A Follow up conversation with Katie’s Snack Cart
Autism Advantage
Tom D. sits back down with Wendy Kohman, the founder of Katie’s Snack Cart. Wendy talks about how she’s taken what started out as a side business for her daughter Katie, to a business that has grown to employing 6 total staff, across 9 clients.
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Marketing, Marketing, Marketing
Autism Advantage
One important thing we’ve noticed that we’re lacking is continually engaging with our community and customers, and telling our story. We realized that, while many of our customers understand exactly what our company does, there are quite a few who had no idea. This was our fault for not being clear and outgoing enough with communicating our story. We decided to do this through digital marketing instead of opting for standard car wash marketing techniques, such as door hangers or printouts.
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Typical Staffing Needs – Recruiting Training Deploying
Autism Advantage
Now, moving into the second half of the season, we’re ready to talk about the other 20% of our staff -- the employees who don’t have autism. These employees are incredibly important to the overall structure of the organization. They navigate the communication, explain the service, and set expectations. While they’re vital to our organization, it can be challenging to find typical people who want to work at a car wash and see the work as an opportunity to grow and have impact.
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2nd Store Open – Frontlines from 1st week
Autism Advantage
Now that we’ve finished up the first week of operations with both stores running, we’re ready to talk about how things went! Instead of putting all the new employees in the new location, we knew it was vital to have a mix of experience levels. We moved about half of our experienced employees to the new location, so each of the two locations is now staffed by half experienced employees and half new employees.
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Hired! - Integrating Candidates into Live Shifts
Autism Advantage
So far this season, we’ve talked about some of our plans for the second location, our big day full of dozens of interviews, and our pre-training process. In that process, as we discussed in the last episode, candidates needed to successfully complete a specific task three times in a row with a time limit. Those who were successful moved onto the next step: being offered a job!
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Almost Employed - Passing Pre-Training
Autism Advantage
We recently hosted our big day of interviews. We had close to a hundred candidates show up. Twenty of these didn’t have autism, and four were unsuccessful in the interview process for various reasons, but we ended up with over 50 qualified candidates who moved onto the next step, our pre-training process.
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Goal 80% Employees with Autism - Post Interview Results
Autism Advantage
We are preparing for a big event: a day of hosting around a hundred candidates in the search for the perfect people to increase our staff and allow us to open our new location. In this episode, we’ll talk about how that interview process went.
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Doubling in Size – The Pre-Recruiting Plan
Autism Advantage
We run Rising Tide Car Wash, which employs several dozen fantastic people with autism. This isn’t a charity, though; we encourage independence and growth by expecting everyone who applies to be able to pull their weight, and we’ve seen great success already.
info_outlineWelcome to the Autism Advantage podcast! I’m your host, Tom D’Eri, the COO and co-founder of Rising Tide Car Wash. In case you’re not familiar with what we do, we employ a fantastic team of individuals with autism, allowing us to empower our staff while offering a fantastic experience to customers. We believe that individuals with autism are an incredible untapped resource for many business, and this show is dedicated to proving that employing these people can create real competitive advantages.
Today, I’ll be joined by two great guests. John D’Eri is a serial entrepreneur who has built various businesses across completely different industries. He’s the CEO and co-founder of Rising Tide Car Wash. (He’s also my father!) Dr. Michael Alessandri is the executive director of University of Miami-Nova Southeastern University Center for Autism & Related Disabilities, a professor at UN for over 20 decades, and one of the most dedicated people we’ve ever met within the autism community.
This podcast is part of a three-year partnership between our team and the aforementioned Center for Autism. We’ve heard many questions about starting businesses employing people with autism, and know that many of you want both actionable steps on how to do so as well as reassurance that it’s possible. We’re here to provide both!
John D’Eri started Rising Tide Car Wash because his son (and my brother), Andrew, is on the autism spectrum. John realized that Andrew had no clear path for a purposeful life with employment opportunities. To help his son, he put his entrepreneurial skills to use. Together, John and I created something scalable and sustainable that would employ not only Andrew, but others who have autism.
Tune into this episode to learn why a car wash specifically is excellent for forming social and emotional connections among people with autism, how important it is to put the business rather than the social enterprise first in some regards, and why only about half of our customers even know that most of our employees have autism.
In This Episode:
[02:37] - John starts off the conversation by explaining why he started Rising Tide Car Wash. The mission was to hire 85% of their staff with autism, create a community, and change people’s perception of autism.
[06:53] - Michael talks about his experience in working with people with autism, and why he’s focusing on employment opportunities now. He shares the story of meeting a young boy named Marlin, and being fascinated by the contrast between the things Marlin could do and the things people were saying he couldn’t do.
[09:24] - It occurred to Michael that there was virtually nothing for people with autism after they exited school.
[11:08] - Work defines a lot of who people are, and for many of the employees at Rising Tide Car Wash, there was some sort of gap or uncertainty before they began working there.
[12:33] - John discusses what his hopes were for his son, Andrew, in terms of Rising Tide Car Wash. As a result of the company, Andrew now has friends, a feeling of accomplishment, the pride of making money, and all the other positives associated with having work.
[17:39] - Michael points out that when you look beyond the autism community, it’s clear that employment forms the foundation of an individual’s social fabric. He also talks about a common misconception about people with autism.
[19:21] - Michael talks about something else he’s been thinking a lot about lately, which is the importance of finding a balance between inclusion in a wider community and supporting people with autism in spending time with other people with the same condition.
[20:44] - We hear John’s thoughts on the way that skillsets translate from work into society. He then points out that at Rising Tide Car Wash, everybody does all of the jobs.
[24:31] - Michael jumps in to discuss the mechanics of a car wash, and the fact that it’s fundamentally structured in such a way that each person has some responsibility for the overall success of the product and result.
[25:20] - When they were starting out with Rising Tide Car Wash, Tom explains, they didn’t understand the gravity of what they were doing.
[27:25] - It’s business first, and you have to couple the social enterprise into it, John points out. You need to consistently produce value and quality.
[30:34] - Michael backtracks a little bit to talk about the issue of trying to build businesses around an individual’s unique restricted interests.
[32:45] - We hear more about the core abilities of many of the people with autism who Michael has worked with.
[35:46] - John talks about how the core abilities that Michael has mentioned are an advantage at Rising Tide Car Wash, and describes some of the steps involved in their process.
[39:50] - The 46 steps of their car-cleaning process create a consistent, quality product that the customer can rely on, John points out.
[43:26] - John’s point is this: by relying on a specific structure and maintaining it regardless of what’s going on, they deliver a product that is quality-driven, value-oriented, and superior every single time.
[44:08] - Only about half of the people who go through the car wash even know that the employees there have autism.
[45:56] - We learn what attracted Michael to the work that John and Tom have been doing at Rising Tide Car Wash.
[48:20] - John steps in to say a couple things to listeners. He emphasizes the point that he opened the car wash to play to his strengths, and other parents of people with autism should play to their own strengths.
[50:15] - Michael adds in a last point of his own by discussing how invested Tom and John are in expanding their mission.
[51:35] - If you have any questions, feel free to ask through the Autism Advantage website!
Links and Resources:
University of Miami-Nova Southeastern University Center for Autism & Related Disabilities