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.
My fantastic guest today is James Emmett, who is one of the world’s leading disability employment consultants. James is and has been the driving force behind many large corporate programs for people with autism and other disabilities at major companies such as TIAA-CREF, Best Buy, Walgreens, Pepsi, and Office Depot. He was also instrumental in helping us at Rising Tide Car Wash get off the ground.
In 2004, James met Randy Lewis, the senior vice president at Walgreens. Randy invited James the opportunity to help plan out the Walgreen outreach initiative that focused on people with autism. This experience helped James realize how much potential there was within corporate situations for people with autism. Since having learned about this incredible potential, he has taken that awareness to other companies and created opportunities there.
There are so many benefits for a company when it comes to hiring people with autism. James has seen an increase in morale among the incoming employees with autism, but also the current employees at a company that launches an autism-related initiative. Companies also experience their cultures changing to be positive and forward-thinking. These are just a few of the many great benefits that James describes.
I’m excited to have James on the show because he offers such a different perspective than many of our previous guests. Instead of having opened a new business geared toward employing people with autism, James’ extensive experience is with working within existing organizations to create employment opportunities for individuals with autism.
Don’t miss this great episode, in which we also talk about some of the specific advantages of employing people with autism, why hiring these people can help create systems that turn out to be better than the existing ones for neurotypical employees, how important it is to have community support, and much more.
In This Episode:
[01:37] - What inspired James to work with large companies and help them harness the advantages of employing people with autism and other disabilities?
[03:18] - James describes what it’s like to work with these companies and create programs for employing people with autism.
[04:44] - We hear about the realizations that people come to in terms of the specific advantages of employing people with autism.
[06:53] - Tom draws out something unique about what James have said: that individuals with autism and other disabilities have faced barriers their whole lives, and have needed to learn to break through them. They bring this grit and resilience to their employers.
[07:23] - James talks more about how this familiarity with breaking through obstacles translates to the work environment. Tom then relates what James has said to the way that they hire people at Rising Tide Car Wash.
[10:28] - When James is talking to a new client, how does he communicate the specific benefits that he and Tom have been discussing?
[13:18] - James talks about how translating what happens at a few sites to the broader organization works.
[15:19] - Tom digs into how the ripple effect from making changes at one distribution center can change things for many more people.
[16:24] - We hear more about how James has convinced people that this will positively affect the daily operations of a business.
[19:38] - How would James recommend that someone who works at an organization that doesn’t currently have a disability employment program go about starting something and creating change at their company?
[21:42] - Tom elaborates on the advice James has been giving about getting support from the community.
[22:43] - James hopes that within the next ten years is that every Fortune 500 company will have a disability inclusion strategy.
[25:24] - How can listeners get in touch with James or hire him as a consultant to help them navigate their disability employment strategy?
Links and Resources:
Disability inclusion at Walgreens
University of Miami-Nova Southeastern University Center for Autism & Related Disabilities
FAU Center for Autism & Related Disabilities