Diversifying Impact – A Follow up conversation with the Chocolate Spectrum
Release Date: 01/20/2018
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. Throughout the first seven episodes of season 2, we chronicled the process of opening a second location of Rising Tide Car Wash, where we employ people with autism. If you tuned in, you heard all about how we planned this location, interviewed and trained our fantastic new employees, how the opening went, and much more.
For the final three episodes of this season, we’re changing things up a bit! We want to revisit some of the incredible entrepreneurs who we featured in season 1 to hear about how their journeys have progressed since we last heard from them. In today’s episode, we’re featuring the awesome Valerie Herskowitz, founder of The Chocolate Spectrum Cafe and Academy. If you haven’t already heard her in the fifth episode of season 1, go listen to that now and then come back here!
You may remember that Val was inspired to expand her sweet hobby into a business as her son with autism, Blake, was graduating from high school. After expanding their chocolate venture online, they opened a brick-and-mortar cafe just a couple of months before our previous conversation. All of the employees had autism or were otherwise differently abled.
Since our last conversation, there has been a huge change in the training side of things. Val 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. With the right equipment and support systems, they found that their employees can be very successful in this role.
The strongest revenue stream has continued to be online shopping, while retail continues to be weak and disappointing in terms of walk-in traffic. The levels haven’t reached what they expected, which Val attributes to location. In response, Val sends out flyers and came up with the idea of developing a Facebook page just for the retailers in her shopping center. Another strategy for increasing their revenue has been branching out into wholesale.
In addition to talking about all of this, Val speaks with great detail (and passion) about her new training program for teens with autism, explaining why it’s so necessary. Tune into this great episode to hear this and much more!
In This Episode:
[01:05] - For listeners who didn’t hear our previous conversation, Val explains what The Chocolate Spectrum Cafe and Academy is and what inspired her to start the company.
[01:50] - How has the company grown over the last year since our previous conversation? In her answer, Val talks about the company branching into coffee.
[06:45] - Val discusses taking the skills that their employees were learning in their coffee training program and put them into an employment situation.
[08:30] - How many people are working at the satellites Val has been describing, and what is her vision for them?
[11:05] - Tom clarifies: Val is using her primary location as a hub and for training, with satellite operations around it to increase distribution and employ more people.
[11:27] - Val talks about how she plans on managing all of this.
[14:35] - We back up a bit to hear how “home base,” the Chocolate Spectrum retail store, is doing these days.
[18:18] - Tom has a couple of suggestions for ways that Val (and listeners, of course!) can market online. He recommends using Mogl and geofencing.
[21:36] - Val shifts into talking specifically about employee growth, and discusses certifications for training and placing people in the community.
[24:53] - The biggest thing that Val’s company provides is teaching their employees how to be employed, since they don’t typically have experience in what is involved in the process and what the expectations are.
[26:04] - Val has always wanted to work with teens, because she feels like the process of teaching the skills that she has described should be started younger. Tom then elaborates on the need for this kind of training.
[27:35] - We learn that Val was able to secure a separate grant for teen training, and will be working with the first group of teens this year.
[28:57] - The biggest challenge Val has experienced with the teens she’s worked with so far is having them learn to work together.
[31:10] - The last thing Val is developing right now to increase their revenue is a wholesale business, which she describes.
[34:12] - How can listeners support Val? In her answer, she talks about a piece of advice that Tom’s dad gave her that she didn’t really believe before.
[36:58] - Tom shares his thoughts on why people who have been touched by autism don’t automatically support businesses like The Chocolate Spectrum and Rising Tide Car Wash, instead of bigger businesses.
Links and Resources:
The Chocolate Spectrum Cafe and Academy
The Chocolate Spectrum: shop online
Valerie Herksowitz on LinkedIn
University of Miami-Nova Southeastern University Center for Autism & Related Disabilities