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.
Tiffany Fixter is the founder of Brewability Lab. At the time we recorded this conversation, it was still in the preparation phases and wasn’t yet up and running thanks to bureaucratic and governmental red tape. Now, though, I’m thrilled to say that Brewability Lab is fully operational and you can visit them (and enjoy some great beers) in Denver, Colorado!
A special education teacher by trade, Tiffany has an incredible entrepreneurial spirit. She moved to Denver for a job opportunity to run a nonprofit day program with about 135 adults with developmental disabilities, about a third of whom had autism. Tiffany was surprised and disappointed to find that only one or two of these people had jobs, so she decided to do something about it!
Opening a brewery started as a playful joke, but ended up being a seriously good idea. Many aspects of running a brewery are ideal for those with autism and developmental disabilities, as you’ll hear in our conversation. Tiffany will also talk about how she raised the funds to start the business largely through crowdfunding campaigns, which definitely had lots of cons to go along with the pros.
After the successful crowdfunding efforts, Tiffany and her dad were lucky enough to find a rare opportunity: a turnkey brewery. She put the Kickstarter money down as a deposit with just ten minutes to spare. Despite this stroke of luck, her #1 recommendation is to borrow double the money that you think you’ll need for your social enterprise, because it always costs more than you expect.
Listen to the episode to hear more of Tiffany’s thoughts on crowdfunding, her advice for entrepreneurs considering getting into a social venture, how much work it takes to get started (and the reason she’s been cleaning toilets all summer instead of teaching), and why it’s so important to have people around to help even when you’re trying to do everything yourself.
In This Episode:
[00:56] - What was Tiffany’s inspiration for starting Brewability Lab?
[02:34] - Tiffany talks more about the details of how Brewability Lab will operate once it opens, and discusses why the brewery is ideal for people with autism and other developmental disabilities.
[03:50] - Right now, they only have a few employees in training for when the brewery opens. They don’t want to hire too many people before they’re closer to opening, which is slowed down by governmental red tape.
[05:12] - Tiffany acknowledges that there’s frustration with them for not being open yet, and goes into more detail about the amazing amounts of time, money, and patience it takes to open a brewery.
[07:08] - Starting any business is tough, Tom agrees, and points out that it’s even harder for a retail setting with a lot of regulatory issues.
[08:58] - We hear more about Tiffany’s campaigns on Kickstarter and Indiegogo, as well as their fundraising events. She discusses some of the pros and cons of crowdfunding this way.
[12:58] - Tiffany wasn’t working during the time of the crowdfunding projects, and needed to treat them as a more-than-full-time job.
[14:02] - The woman who gave Tiffany the final $3,000 donation to meet the goal came through the Rocky Mountain Down Syndrome Association.
[14:32] - One of the greatest strengths of crowdfunding, Tom points out, is that you get to see whether people really want something.
[15:13] - We hear more about what Tiffany learned through the course of the process of crowdfunding and opening Brewability Lab.
[17:25] - Tom explains that when they were starting Rising Tide Car Wash, they realized that the business had an impact not only in employing individuals, but also in communicating the message of how capable people with autism and other disabilities are.
[18:30] - Now that Tiffany has done the crowdfunding process, would she recommend it to others as a fundraising method?
[20:25] - The entrepreneurial journey is not an easy road, Tom explains. He and Tiffany then talk about the costs of a crowdfunding campaign, which often costs around $10,000 to do well.
[22:46] - What are the most important things that Tiffany has learned about starting a social enterprise?
[25:35] - Tiffany lists some ways that people can help her with the brewery, whether that’s through advice, money, or help with electrical issues!
[27:17] - Tiffany has gotten some pretty nasty emails from people who don’t like her concept, including one from someone she used to work for who accused her of taking advantage of people with disabilities. Tom responds with advice to listen to these people, but not remember what they say.
Links and Resources:
Brewability Lab on Kickstarter
Rocky Mountain Down Syndrome Association
University of Miami-Nova Southeastern University Center for Autism & Related Disabilities