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, and my co-host for this season is Tom Sena. Throughout season 2, we’ll be chronicling the process of opening a second location of Rising Tide Car Wash, where we employ people with autism.
In the first four episodes of this season, we discussed our plans for our new location, the day of nearly a hundred interviews, our pre-training process, and how we proceeded with live training. With our amazing new employees trained and ready to go, we did it! We opened Rising Tide’s second location!
In this episode, we’ll be talking about the process of opening the new location. 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.
This meant our existing employees really need to step up and take on more responsibility and leadership, and they’ve done such a great job. The new employees have been fantastic too, as they learn all of the other parts of working with us that weren’t specifically covered in the live training shifts.
Our approach involves three facets that we envision as being a pyramid. At the base is the process of cleaning the car. Once our employees understand this basic process, we move up the pyramid to the next layer: quality. We ensure that all of our employees understand just how clean a car needs to be. Finally, at the top of the pyramid is speed. This is the phase we’re currently in, as our employees learn to clean cars in 20 minutes or under.
Tune into this episode to hear much more about all of this! You’ll also learn about how we addressed some issues with some of our employees not understanding the need to be on time, why we see scripts as an important part of the business, and that some of our employees without autism have been more of a challenge than the ones with autism.
In This Episode:
[00:21] - Tom S. reveals that the opening of the second location wasn’t completely smooth, partly thanks to Hurricane Irma.
[00:57] - How are the employees -- old and new alike -- acclimating to the situation with the new location?
[02:26] - Tom S. digs deeper into the differences between live training shifts and full shifts now that the second location is open. He also discusses how they’ve addressed tardiness among some of the new employees.
[04:52] - Tom D. explores one of the strategies they used to correct tardiness.
[05:18] - We hear about the three-pronged approach involving the basic process, quality, and speed. Tom D. explains this as being like a pyramid, with the basic process as the base and quality as the next step.
[08:25] - The peak of the pyramid is ramping up the speed. Tom D. talks about some strategies they use to encourage their employees to work quickly and ensure customers aren’t waiting around too long at the car wash.
[09:40] - If you’re interested in creating your own enterprise, Tom S. offers some tips on where to focus your attention.
[10:36] - Tom D. compares the process of opening and growing the first store with the experience of opening this one.
[11:37] - Their employees with autism have been the least of their problems, Tom S. points out. He explains that everybody who they brought into live training has worked out and shown an eagerness to be a valuable team member.
[12:37] - One of their employees has some behavioral issues involving outbursts. Tom D. talks about how they’ve handled this.
[15:02] - Tom S. talks about how important it is to be direct and make sure employees know exactly where they stand.
[16:15] - Tom D. talks about customer reactions. Overall, the customers are really happy. He also explains that they’ve put together scripts for their employees to address different subjects brought up by customers.
[18:04] - One thing that they recognized very early on as important was the scripting, Tom S. agrees. This is why their greeter has been one of their most important roles.
[19:49] - Tom D. gives a shout-out to the company’s CEO (and his dad), John D’Eri, who really understands how to handle objections and how important scripting is.
[20:30] - In addition to the scripts, Tom S. points out that understanding and looking out for customer feedback is a big point of emphasis.
[22:00] - Tom D. touches on one more thing, which will be addressed in more detail in the next episode: the hardest thing so far has been the part of their workforce that isn’t on the autism spectrum.
[24:01] - A big question that they get from other autism entrepreneurs is how you get good typical support staff.
Links and Resources:
University of Miami-Nova Southeastern University Center for Autism & Related Disabilities