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’m joined by the remarkable Bill Morris. Bill founded Blue Star Recyclers, which employs people with autism and was named Colorado’s 2016 Social Venture of the Year.
After he was laid off from his job when he was in his 50s, Bill began working at a disability services center with no relevant experience other than having a developmentally disabled older brother. There, he encountered four young men with incredible innate skill for electronics. Each of them turned out to have autism.
Seeing the potential, Bill wrote a business plan for an electronics recycling organization (something else he had no prior experience in) to create an employment opportunity for these men and put their talents to use. When Bill brought his now-employees from their dayhab setting into an employment setting, he saw remarkable changes in them. Two non-verbal men, for example, became verbal in the workplace setting.
After beginning as a for-profit company, Blue Star Recyclers became a nonprofit to be able to fund the gap between earned income and expenses. Now, they’ve almost completely closed that gap. Once they do, they’ll use grants to buy equipment and grow. The current goal is to become fully self-sustaining, then to be profitable for a year, and then to give the company back to the employees and become 100% employee-owned. In this conversation, you’ll learn about the company’s transition into a nonprofit, and what the benefits have been.
In the past, Bill has tried to start businesses with other motives, such as making money. In those cases, he ran into lots of obstacles. When he opened this one, though, everything seemed to come together in remarkable ways. “It’s the universe’s way of giving you the nod of approval,” he explains.
For example, trying to buy a truck led to finding investors who did an incredible amount to turn the company from a vision into a reality. Bill’s story will inspire you to believe in the good in people, and motivate you to get out there and find your own kind-hearted investors who believe in your social enterprise.
In This Episode:
[01:03] - Why did Bill start Blue Star Recyclers, and what has the journey been like so far?
[03:39] - Bill talks more about learning the recycling industry, which he was completely unfamiliar with before he started researching it to create his company.
[05:12] - Tom points out the importance of being honest about the things you don’t know, which is similar to what Bill has been talking about.
[05:52] - How did Bill find people who helped fill his knowledge gaps, and build his team? In his answer, Bill reveals how much of an impact his quest to find a truck had on the business.
[07:40] - We hear about a couple of the people who Bill has hired so far.
[09:36] - The motive for both Blue Star Recyclers and Rising Tide Car Wash was to do good and put people to work, not to make heaps of money, Bill points out.
[11:22] - Bill talks more about the mentors who helped him figure out how to build the business from a technical perspective.
[13:21] - We learn about the process of going from for-profit to non-profit, and what Bill’s plan is for the future of the organization.
[16:11] - Tom draws out some of the statistics and business advantages that Bill had mentioned related to employing individuals with disabilities. Bill then talks about how he takes advantage of those benefits, as well as how remarkable the impact of the work has been for several of his employees.
[19:45] - Bill has learned that people on the spectrum are inherently safe employees because they don’t deviate from the procedure that you give them.
[20:22] - Bill thinks that he and Tom may end up saving their respective industries, and explains why.
[21:53] - Other employers who employ the entry-level workforce have problems that Bill doesn’t experience at all with his employees.
[24:35] - Tom points out that you need to be able to take the long view if you’re planning to stay in business for a long time.
[25:20] - What advice would Tom give to people who are looking to start social enterprises and hire individuals with autism?
[27:47] - Tom lists some ways for listeners to find his company and help them out.
Links and Resources:
Blue Star Recyclers on Facebook
University of Miami-Nova Southeastern University Center for Autism & Related Disabilities