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.
Paige Morrow, this episode’s inspirational and informative guest, is the managing director of Extraordinary Ventures. She has managed college students in the past, and explains in our conversation that people with autism are a far more dedicated workforce because they want to work and appreciate the opportunity.
Extraordinary Ventures, or EV, was started in 2007 by a group of parents who all had kids on the autism spectrum who were aging out of high school. These parents were all concerned about the fact that their kids would soon age out of having a structured environment and enter the real world, facing a harsh reality with limited opportunities. Together, they came up with EV as a meaningful solution.
Extraordinary Ventures is fascinatingly different than the other companies we’ve featured on the show so far, because it isn’t just one business. Instead, it’s a nonprofit organization that currently operates six small businesses in diverse fields ranging from laundry to dog walking to candle-making.
Paige and I agree that structuring the work environment is vitally important when you’re running a business employing people with autism. At EV, you’ll see lots of tools to reinforce this structure. Paige offers the example of their laundry business, where they have a folding board with two hinged wings that employees can use to fold a shirt perfectly every time.
You’ll hear in this episode that Paige considers two questions about potential businesses: does the business model fit the skills of the individuals with autism who need employment, and does the business fit the local market? She offers the example of how they tested their dog-walking company to explain how she answers these questions, and why they’re so important. Tune in to learn more so you can figure out how to apply these concepts to your own potential business! You’ll also hear about various ways in which employees with autism are an asset, and how quickly EV has grown.
In This Episode:
[00:56] - Paige talks about Extraordinary Ventures’ mission, how it operates, and how it got started.
[03:22] - We hear more about lean startup principles, what they are, and how EV has leveraged them to build successful entities.
[05:01] - Tom draws out some of the fascinating things that Paige has been talking about regarding the two questions they need to look at.
[05:37] - Paige talks about some of the specific tests they ran, and mentions the various different businesses that EV has. She goes into depth on this topic with an example using their most recent business, which is dog walking, and explains how they tested the potential of the business before committing to it.
[09:15] - Tom shares his thoughts on what Paige has been saying about the dog-walking business and pulls out some important advice for listeners.
[10:23] - What are some of the advantages that Paige has seen in employing people with autism?
[11:38] - Everybody has a natural inclination to focus on their deficits and those of the people around them, rather than focusing on their strengths, Tom points out.
[12:35] - One of the things that Tom has found at Rising Tide is that structuring the work environment is a critical part of building a successful autism-based social enterprise.
[13:15] - Paige responds by discussing how EV has gone about structuring the work environment, and what the benefits of that have been.
[15:25] - Does Paige have any thoughts on how one could go about testing different structures and supports, or build a system of them from the ground up?
[17:18] - Tom points out that one of Paige’s concepts was that building structures and processes leads to a consistent, high-quality service.
[18:05] - Paige uses Tom as an example, pointing out that he probably hasn’t ever made a candle before but would be able to make one on his first day using their existing structures.
[19:17] - How has EV been growing? Paige’s answer reveals just how impressive the company is, and how fast it has grown.
[20:59] - Paige offers some various ways that listeners can contribute to and support Extraordinary Ventures.
Links and Resources:
University of Miami-Nova Southeastern University Center for Autism & Related Disabilities