Autism Advantage

Welcome 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 h

Welcome 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

Welcome 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 going to change 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’re featuring Wendy Kohman, who you’ll remember from the third episode of season 1. (If you haven’t already heard it, go listen now and then come back to this one!) In our last conversation, Wendy described how she came up with the idea of Katie’s Snack Cart, and why it was a good fit for Katie, her daughter who has autism. In short, the company sells more healthful alternati

Welcome 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. We’ve been making great progress throughout this podcast. In the previous episodes this season, we’ve talked about planning our second location, the interview and training processes, our successful opening, and the role of our employees who don’t have autism. Now we’re going to talk about digital marketing. 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, and so we decided to change that. We decided to do this through digital marketing instead of opting for standa

Welcome 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 half of this season, we’ve already covered a lot of ground! We’ve discussed planning the new location, interviewing dozens of people in one day, the pre-training process for our new employees, the live training process, and the successful opening of Rising Tide’s second location. 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 help coach and train the rest of the employees, and are generally the frontline for customer experience. They navigate the communication, explain the service, and set expectations. While they’re vital to our organization, it can be challengin

Welcome 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 employe

Welcome 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. 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! The next step is live training, which is what we’ll be focusing on today. Our employees, who are paid from this point forward, have the core skills they’ll need at this point but aren’t quite ready to be fully effective in their roles yet. We believe that employees in each role need around nine training shifts over the course of about four weeks. To start this process, we let our curren

Welcome 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. If you’ve been tuning in this season, you know that 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. That’s what we’re here to talk about today! Pre-training involves asking our recruits to be able to do our most basic production process, which involves 39 steps, three times in a row in under six minutes each time. This pre-training process allows us to bring in people who we aren’t quite sure will be up to the task of working here, and gives them a fair shot at doing the job. It also sets our employees up

Welcome 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. If you listened to our last episode, you know that we were 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. For our interviews, we’ve developed an assessment tool to score the likelihood that an interviewee will be successful at this particular job. The process takes 15-30 minutes and focuses on whether the candidate is functionally capable of working at a car wash. We knew that a traditional, conversation-based interview style tends not to let people with autism really shine, so we focus on hard skills instead. This also ensures that the candidate knows exactly what they’ll

Welcome 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 inter

Welcome 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. I’m honored to introduce today’s guest, Randy Lewis, who is a true legend in the autism employment world. Randy is the visionary behind the Walgreens Disability Employment Program, which is one of the most well-established disability employment programs in the corporate world. He’s also the father of a young man with autism. Unlike every previous guest on the show, Randy didn’t create a new organization to employ people with autism. Instead, he created change within an existing company. Doing so involved navigating t

Welcome 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 ki

Welcome 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. Today I’m joined by the remarkable Bill Morris. Bill founded Blue Star Recyclers, which employs people with autism and was named Colorado’s 2016 Social Venture of the Year. After he was laid off from his job when he was in his 50s, Bill began working at a disability services center with no relevant experience other than having a developmentally disabled older brother. There, he encountered four young men with incredible innate skill for electronics. Each of them turned out to have autism. Seeing the potential, Bill wr

Welcome 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. Tiffany Fixter is the founder of Brewability Lab. At the time we recorded this conversation, it was still in the preparation phases and wasn’t yet up and running thanks to bureaucratic and governmental red tape. Now, though, I’m thrilled to say that Brewability Lab is fully operational and you can visit them (and enjoy some great beers) in Denver, Colorado! A special education teacher by trade, Tiffany has an incredible entrepreneurial spirit. She moved to Denver for a job opportunity to run a nonprofit day program wi

Welcome 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. My fantastic guest today is James Emmett, who is one of the world’s leading disability employment consultants. James is and has been the driving force behind many large corporate programs for people with autism and other disabilities at major companies such as TIAA-CREF, Best Buy, Walgreens, Pepsi, and Office Depot. He was also instrumental in helping us at Rising Tide Car Wash get off the ground. In 2004, James met Randy Lewis, the senior vice president at Walgreens. Randy invited James the opportunity to help plan

Welcome 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. Valerie Herskowitz is one of my fellow South Florida autism entrepreneurs and the founder of The Chocolate Spectrum Cafe and Academy. So far, the cafe only employs adults with autism or developmental disabilities, and Val has been learning to do just about every aspect of running the business herself. While this is complicated in the early stages, it’s a strength in that she’ll be intimately familiar with every facet of the business. Val had been involved in pastry and chocolates as a hobby, never thinking she would t

Welcome 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. Ray Steffey, along with his son Joe, founded Poppin’ Joe’s Gourmet Kettle Korn. We’ve had the opportunity to share Ray’s story quite a bit in our Awakening the Autism Entrepreneur workshops, and the reason behind the company really resonates with the people who have come. As you’ll hear in this episode, the company’s story begins when Joe was in high school. Ray was told that Joe has no attention span, can’t say on task, would probably never hold a job, and would likely live in a group home for his whole life.  When h

Denise Resnik has had a truly remarkable entrepreneurial background and has been in business as a marketing communications consultant for 30 years. Her projects include the Southwest Autism Research and Resource Center (SARRC), First Place AZ, DRA Collective, and, most importantly for today’s conversation, the remarkable SMILE Biscotti. Denise is also the proud mother of a young man with autism, Matt, who was diagnosed at age 2. She was told to love, accept, and eventually institutionalize her son, which she found unacceptable. Instead of following that path, Denise used Matt as her source of inspiration, and together they created SMILE Biscotti. Ever since, they’ve been working to find a better way for Matt and others like him. Originally, SMILE stood for “Supporting Matt’s Independent Living Enterprise.” As the company grew, though, it evolved; the name now stands for “Supporting My Independent Living Enterprise.” The company’s true goal and mission is to help other families build employment opportunities a

Welcome 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. Wendy Kohman is one of our favorite Awakening the Autism Entrepreneur workshop participants! We did a series of ten workshops across the country in partnership with the University of Miami to inspire people to start businesses supporting people with autism. Wendy had already founded the incredible Katie’s Snack Cart, but participated in the workshops anyway, and we were delighted to have her there! When Wendy’s daughter, Katie, was in middle school, they began the transition process with Katie’s school. They evaluated

Welcome 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.  Today, I’ll be joined by two great guests. John D’Eri is a serial entrepreneur who has built various businesses across completely different industries. He’s the CEO and co-founder of Rising Tide Car Wash. (He’s also my father!) Dr. Michael Alessandri is the executive director of University of Miami-Nova Southeastern University Center for Autism & Related Disabilities, a professor at UN for over 20 decades, and one of the most dedicated people we’ve ever met within the autism community.  This podcast is part of a