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 season 2 of the Autism Advantage podcast! I’m your host, Tom D’Eri, and my co-host for this season is Tom Sena. In case you aren’t familiar with what we do, let me take a moment to catch you up! 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.
In fact, things are going so well that we’re working on opening a second location! In this season, we’re going to be doing things a little bit differently than last season. As we work on opening this new location, we’re going to chronicle the process for you in a StartUp-esque way. In other words, we want to bring you along on the journey all the way from the beginning of the recruiting process all the way through our much-anticipated launch.
We’ve been working on this second location for a couple of years now, and we’re finally ready to start the interview process. This will take place next week, when we plan on hosting around a hundred candidates at the current location. Once we select the people who will move forward in the process, we’ll work on training them. When we open the second location, we’ll staff it with a combination of these new employees and our existing, more experienced staff members.
Because we have so little turnover (less than 20% annually), we rarely have the opportunity to bring many new people on board. This makes us especially excited about the second location, which will allow us to deeply grow our community and get lots of new folks involved.
Listen to this episode to hear the details on all this and much more! And once you’ve heard this episode, be sure to tune in next week. We’re excited to share with you how the big interview process goes, and we’ll also take some time to talk about what the next steps are.
In This Episode:
[00:54] - Tom Sena takes a moment to explain what Rising Tide Car Wash is going to do next week, which is one of the largest-ever mass recruiting initiatives for people with autism ever.
[01:28] - Tom D’Eri talks about the overarching strategy in terms of getting the teams ready for the new location. Tom S. then points out that they’ve had the opportunity to push their current staff forward into stronger roles.
[03:36] - An important point is that the first location started about 4 years ago as a brand new thing. Tom D. talks about that experience, as well as the company’s expectations for employees.
[05:54] - We hear more about the company’s standards-based training and how Rising Tide Car Wash evaluates potential employees.
[08:23] - The company is looking to bring around a hundred candidates in for interviews next weekend. We learn more about how the hosts anticipate this process will go, and where they came up with the numbers of interviewees and employees they expect at each step.
[10:43] - We learn that Tom S. has been deeply involved throughout the whole recruiting process. He discusses how things have progressed so far, and how he encouraged more people to get involved.
[13:58] - It’s both a blessing and a curse, Tom D. points out, that they have very little turnover.
[16:02] - Tom D. talks about the community partners he has previously mentioned. He points out that the local school district is a great resource in terms of recruiting.
[18:23] - We hear about the great community that Rising Tide Car Wash is part of (and has helped to create). We also learn that two universities are involved in doing a study about the company.
[20:39] - Tom and Tom talk a bit more about the growth of the team and the anticipated impact of getting so many new people in the door, as well as what they’re excited to see during this process.
[22:53] - The best thing about the job is seeing the growth of people over time, Tom D. says.
[24:56] - We learn why it’s so important to structure the interview process in a concrete way that involves doing specific tasks within the work environment rather than using standard conversational interview methods.
[26:32] - Tom D. offers the example of a specific employee, Matt, who had hundreds of interviews but was never hired simply because the interview process didn’t play to his strengths. At Rising Tide Car Wash, he’s one of the best employees.
[28:10] - What are some of the potential pitfalls that might come up, such as distraction issues?
Links and Resources:
University of Miami-Nova Southeastern University Center for Autism & Related Disabilities