Lessons From the Trenches – A Follow up conversation with Brewability Labs
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. Today, we’ll be talking to Tiffany Fixter of Brewability Lab. When we last spoke in season 1 episode 7, the company was dealing with red tape and hadn’t quite opened yet. Go listen to that episode for some background, and then tune in here to learn how much has changed!
As a quick refresher, Tiffany was a special education teacher who was disappointed to find out how few people with autism have jobs. So, having the entrepreneurial spirit that she does, she decided that she would do something about it! After a successful crowdfunding effort, Tiffany found a turnkey brewery and put down a deposit on it. That’s when they ran into some red tape -- and when we had our last conversation!
Now, 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.
Because of their hidden location, Brewability Lab is still struggling to keep up with bills. The alternative to this location, Tiffany points out, is a downtown location that costs tens of thousands of dollars per month. In our conversation, she explains various other ideas she has for how to make the business more profitable, while making clear how difficult the financial aspect has been. This is a great reminder to entrepreneurs that you should always budget for the unexpected and expect your costs to be higher than your initial projections.
In our conversation today, Tiffany and I will talk about lots of other topics including various kinds of advertising and marketing, some tools that can help you drive more traffic to your business (and one strategy you should definitely avoid), and what advice we can give to entrepreneurs in the early stages of opening a business. Tune in, enjoy this final episode of season 2, and don’t forget to come back when we return with season 3!
In This Episode:
[00:54] - Tiffany takes a moment to explain what Brewability Labs is, and why she started it, for listeners who may not be familiar with the venture.
[01:31] - We hear about where Tiffany’s company is now, and how it’s been doing. She also talks about what she’s done to facilitate the incredible progress that her employees have made since the opening.
[03:17] - Money is still a struggle after being operational for over a year, Tiffany reveals.
[04:11] - What are Tiffany’s next steps? She explores both the reasons why it’s so hard to make any money in her business and the ideas she has for increasing profitability.
[08:44] - Tiffany has sold off everything she can other than the absolute necessities to be a brewery, she reveals. She then addresses whether she has sources to get grants from, and invites listeners to email her if they have ideas.
[09:43] - We hear Tiffany’s thoughts about opening a pizzeria.
[11:04] - Tom brings up two important points related to what Tiffany has been saying.
[12:15] - What has Tiffany learned from the brewery and transferring to the pizzeria idea? She talks specifically about the location issue.
[13:04] - The company’s advertising is pretty much word-of-mouth at this point, Tiffany reveals. She discusses whether she has considered online advertising.
[16:46] - Is there a common thread between the people organizing the events that Tiffany has been talking about?
[18:21] - Tom recommends Mogl to Tiffany and any listeners who are interested in doing more online advertising. Tiffany then complains about her experience with Groupon and explains why she’s no longer on the site.
[20:56] - What would Tiffany say to other people who are looking into starting a social enterprise?
[22:30] - Tiffany addresses the question of whether she has thought about doing any type of internship programs. Tom then offers some recommendations about opening a new business.
[25:22] - The extra costs that come up in a business are really scary, Tiffany reveals, using the example of transportation.
[30:13] - Tiffany offers suggestions on what listeners can do to help her business, from making a tax-deductible donation to spreading the word to contacting her with any leads or advice on moving forward.
Links and Resources:
Brewability Lab on Kickstarter
University of Miami-Nova Southeastern University Center for Autism & Related Disabilities