003 - Starting Small: What to Do If You’re Not an Entrepreneur
Release Date: 11/18/2016
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.
Wendy Kohman is one of our favorite Awakening the Autism Entrepreneur workshop participants! We did a series of ten workshops across the country in partnership with the University of Miami to inspire people to start businesses supporting people with autism. Wendy had already founded the incredible Katie’s Snack Cart, but participated in the workshops anyway, and we were delighted to have her there!
When Wendy’s daughter, Katie, was in middle school, they began the transition process with Katie’s school. They evaluated what Katie liked and was good at, and what she could offer in the working world. Using her strengths and interests, they figured out that giving her a good and meaningful life after high school would likely involve food, being on the move, and interacting with people. After a lot of thought, strategizing, and creativity, they came up with the idea of a food cart selling great alternatives to vending machine junk.
They started things off by borrowing a cart from Katie’s school, buying some healthy snacks, making banana bread, and going to the two places that they knew would be safe to try out the concept: their church office, and Wendy’s husband’s office. They found that people enjoyed the idea (and their food!). From there, they’ve had the luxury of being able to expand at their own pace while learning what works and what doesn’t.
In addition to going into more depth about all this, Wendy talks about some of the things they’ve learned throughout the process so far, what their goals are for Katie’s Snack Cart, how Katie has done with the process and business, how customers have responded to the venture, and much more!
In This Episode:
[01:25] - Wendy starts things off by telling the story behind Katie’s Snack Cart, and explaining how they settled on the idea of starting a food cart.
[03:35] - Tom draws out some of the interesting things that Wendy explained during her story about starting the food cart.
[04:01] - How has the experience been so far? In her answer, Wendy explores how they started testing the idea in a limited environment to assess whether it might work.
[05:49] - Wendy talks about some of the most important things they’ve learned so far in the process of running Katie’s Snack Cart. She points out that because this is not their main livelihood, they have the luxury of being able to go slowly.
[07:56] - Tom points out how well Wendy has done the prototyping process, and why it was so important. He points out that the path leads from unconscious incompetence, to conscious incompetence, to conscous competence, to unconscious competence.
[09:22] - How has the business gone so far? In her answer, Wendy talks about their growth so far and their anticipated growth in the future.
[10:59] - The immediate goal for Katie’s Snack Cart has always been to give Katie a meaningful life. Wendy expands on this, and their secondary goals. Tom then points out that this is a legitimate business filling a real market need that they’re weaving Katie’s strengths into.
[13:16] - We hear what Wendy has learned about what people want and need from this business.
[15:16] - Before starting the business, Wendy went on an assumption that people wanted things other than typical vending machine fare. Beyond that, she has learned everything since doing it, and points out that you can’t just go on assumptions.
[16:01] - Wendy talks about how Katie has done with this whole process, and how her cart helps her handle new environments.
[18:09] - Tom points out that they were nervous about how employees would respond to the chaos of a car wash, but they too found that the employees were successful once they had familiarity with the process of what they’re supposed to do.
[18:58] - Wendy has hired two other young adults (one with autism, and one without) as bakers.
[20:31] - Every single comment that Wendy has received from customers who already know them has been very, very positive. People at locations where people didn’t already know them were a bit standoffish at the beginning, but have now warmed up and enjoy Katie’s presence and business.
[22:31] - How can listeners get involved with Katie’s Snack Cart?
Links and Resources:
Katie’s Snack Cart on Facebook
Awakening the Autism Entrepreneur
University of Miami-Nova Southeastern University Center for Autism & Related Disabilities