Thomas D'Eri | How a Non-Traditional Workforce Can Make a Business Thrive

Srini Rao: Thomas, welcome to the Unmistakable Creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us.

Thomas D'Eri: Srini, it's so good to be here with you today. I'm so excited. Yeah, it is my

Srini Rao: pleasure to have you here. I actually found out about you by way of our mutual literary agent, Lisa Dimona. And as I was saying before we hit record here, when I read the first few lines of the pitch, I was like a car wash.

And then when I understood what you guys did, I thought, okay, yeah, this is a no brainer. But before we get into your new book and all of that from reading the book, I got the sense that your father has had a profound impact on your life. And I wanted to start by asking you, what is one of the most important things That you learned from your father that has influenced what you've ended up doing with your life.

Thomas D'Eri: Yeah he absolutely has had just an incredible impact on me. Certainly my biggest mentor in life and has shaped not only my professional career because we built Rising Tide Car Wash together. Also really huge parts of how I just go about thinking about the world. And I think the quote and the thing that he has always drilled into me from a really young age was that there, there is no magic.

There's just hard work and this perspective that things aren't really necessarily going to go right. People are going to look at your success when you have success. Luckily, he was a successful entrepreneur for most of my life. They're going to look at that and say, Oh you got lucky or these things happened and that's why he's successful.

Right place, right time. People don't see the tremendous amount of work, the constant daily small failures that we experience as entrepreneurs and really in any pursuit that's really challenging or something you really want to do. And that he would always say that to me in sports and then in my studies and now in this business, there's no magic, there's just hard work.

Just keep going, keep pushing, keep practicing, keep trying. And that's something I've really taken with me. every aspect of my life. And when you were growing up what were you thinking in terms of potential career paths? Because I don't think starting a car wash is on the list of one of those things that your high school guidance counselor suggests, much like many of the people that I have here.

Srini Rao: And for people listening, there's a reason. We have Thomas here, we're going to get to that, but there's something very special about this car wash. But I'm just wondering career path that just doesn't seem like where you'd end up based on your educational background and everything

Thomas D'Eri: else.

I know. Definitely not. I when I was, so my dad, like I said, he's been an entrepreneur my whole life and that was always the path I wanted to go in some way or another. We I looked at him and wanted to see okay, how can I use business to reach my goals?

And that's how he really always approached business was. Whatever he was doing. He had a document management company. He had an equestrian center for a time like just different things. And it was always because there was a pursuit, some goal. And I luckily grew up in, in a household that was awesome and I got, really got the, I was born on third base in so many ways.

So I had this perspective from a pretty young age that I wanted to try to use that to do good in the world. And. Entrepreneurship when I got to college and got exposed to this idea of social entrepreneurship that you can have impact through using business, I was like totally hooked on.

So when I was going to my undergrad degree, which was a business degree, but it wasn't really necessarily focused on entrepreneurship. I really was like, okay, let's figure out how do I I was really interested in sustainable business, like corporate social responsibility. I got internships and stuff like that in college.

I'm a bit of a research nerd, so that was where I started was like in research departments in a couple of different consultancies when I was in college. And I thought it was interesting work, but nobody was candidly, no one was really fulfilled in those roles. They got into these like corporate social responsibility roles as ways to try to influence big business to, to be more ethical and have more impact.

But that's really difficult to influence those types of organizations, especially from the outside. So I saw these folks and I was like, damn this doesn't really seem like it's for me. They're making good money and it's like a prestigious job, but it's not really something that's having the type of impact that, that I think they set out for.

And certainly that I want to have. So then I got to start to meet some people who were social entrepreneurs and a lot of them candidly were struggling financially. But. They were on fire with their mission and they really felt like they were having impact. They really felt like it could change the world.

So I graduated college and was okay, like I want to do something in that. That realm and then and I guess I'll just start talking a little bit more about business now But the you know We have a need in our family and that my brother had autism and he was graduating high school when I was finishing college And it became really clear really quickly that he was gonna need Support in order to lead the full adult life that we knew he was capable of Even though he was certainly smart enough, super hard worker, really kind and caring young man he wasn't going to interview well, there weren't a lot of opportunities out there for him, the programs that he was in, simply it really wasn't they weren't getting anyone jobs and they certainly weren't getting him a job we knew we had to take action and my dad at this point was like Let's start a business to employ Andrew and figure it out from there.

That could be a social enterprise and worst case scenario, Tom, you got a sweet story to tell and you can go to get in your MBA and go down a different route. Best case scenario, we've got a really great business and we're employing Andrew and hopefully lots of other people with autism like him.

Srini Rao: Tell me what it's like to grow up with a sibling who has autism because I think that for so many of us we only experience the realities of autism through what we see on TV and what we see on media. And I remember when I had Tara McMullin here, she was diagnosed with autism way later in life.

I was like, Tara, I've met you two or three times in person. I was like, in a million years, I would have never guessed. That you have autism. And of course she says it's a spectrum, but tell me what it's like to grow up with a sibling like this. Yeah, certainly. And like you said, autism is such a large spectrum.

Thomas D'Eri: Everybody has a different experience with it. But my brother sits somewhere in the middle of the autism spectrum. He's got a mild intellectual disability along with his autism. It was just it was really different than I think a normal brotherly relationship when we're so close in age, we're like 20 months apart.

And he we didn't have the closeness. I think that most brothers at that point would have. We didn't we didn't talk about girls. We didn't play sports together. We didn't do a lot of things that. My other friends that had siblings that were so close we really, we bonded over movies.

Andrew's a big movie guy. He loves animated movies. I also love animated movies. So like we'd watch toy story together. We'd watch land before time, like all these movies that he was just like, he's obsessed with, to be honest, but I also really liked them. So we'd watch them together and have fun like that.

But I really, I at some degree I took on like a protector. Perspective with Andrew, a lot of siblings will talk about being like a parent sibling and that was similar when we went to school together for a short time, we're in the same school. And I was his protector. You weren't going to mess with Andrew because then you were going to mess with me.

And probably that wasn't like the greatest thing for either of us. But it certainly that was really our relationship. It was more of like I was there to look out for him. We bonded over certain things, but it wasn't like a typical sibling relationship.

Srini Rao: What are the challenges that somebody like your brother faces both in early childhood and in adolescence?

Because being a teenager is already

Thomas D'Eri: a shit show. Yeah. Yeah. So I think normally what you really experience a lot is like a tremendous amount of bullying. Andrew was so blessed in that. He had this group of friends that when he was really young they like really loved him. He would like one of his things when he gets stressed out is he'll recite lines to movies and stuff.

And that was something that kids really liked when he was like in kindergarten, first grade early on. And there was like three or four other young men in his class that really like just they loved him and they continued to love him all the way through high school. And luckily these. Young men ended up being some, like the most popular kids in their class.

So I think that shielded Andrew from a lot of the bullying that many kids with autism face. But I think he he always really, he struggled to find what where he fit. He didn't at some point intellectually wasn't able to keep up with the class curriculum.

He wasn't able to like he was different socially, obviously. So he I think he had struggles finding his place and that tends to be the case for a lot of kids with autism that they have different interests, different ways of communicating, different ways of being. And until they find.

other people that are like them. They often just feel like an outcast. And so Andrew would regularly just retreat into his bedroom and play his video games, and do his thing. He wasn't too interested in interacting with other people. And I think I attribute a lot of that to just not feeling like the people around him I think necessarily were on the same wavelength.

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How does it

Srini Rao: change the dynamics of a family? And particularly as a parent, when your parents found out one, how old was he? And because I'd imagine initially that's so devastating for so many parents to find

Thomas D'Eri: this out. Yeah, it was. It's the type of thing I think that really just totally alters the course of every family, right?

I think for our family we found out Andrew had autism when he was three, so very early on. And at the time that was really early at the time, I think the diagnosis rate was somewhere around one in 10, 000. Today it's one in 44. So you see diagnosis rates way higher today than you used to. So Andrew was quite lucky to get diagnosed at such a young age and be able to start getting.

The support he needed to work through some of his behavioral issues. And he I think my parents, they put all of their effort into Andrew and that there was a lot of, he had just a lot of needs when he was young. And it did a couple things. I think our family was one, my, my parents always struggled with what is he going to do when he's an adult?

My dad has this as an entrepreneur and as someone his disposition is just really looking into the future. And so he would always look at Andrew from the time he was a young kid. He would, and I was like probably 12 years old when he would start saying this to me. He's I don't see Andrew.

Like this cute little 8, 9, 10 year old, I see him as a 45, 50 year old man, and what is he gonna do at that point? So that was something that I think they really worried about Andrew's future. I think every parent probably worries about their children's future, it's just more pronounced when you have a kid with autism.

And it also changed my relationship with my parents because for me, I somehow from a young age internalized this idea that I didn't want to cause any trouble, any additional trouble for my parents. I wanted to be... Like this nice kid, this easy kid, like I wasn't going to get in trouble. I wasn't gonna throw a fit or get upset, really try my best just to be quote unquote, no trouble Thomas.

And that was I think it took me a long time just to even recognize that and to learn. It's okay to struggle sometimes too, and okay to admit that, and that, that was challenging for me and then on the flip side of that my, my parents, I think, recognized that they would give Under a ton more attention than me, because they had to.

So they would often then maybe overcompensate a little bit and provide me with like things that I didn't necessarily even want like a nice car in high school or something like that. That wasn't something that I really valued, but it was something that there was their way of trying to help support me and lift me up.

They also did a lot of other things that were really awesome, like giving me coaching and being able to Like really invest in my interests, which at the time in high school were like baseball and football. So like getting me coaches to get me better at those things that helped me learn over time that might get way better at things, even though I would generally stink at them early on.

Srini Rao: What are the support systems like for people like your brother, particularly when we're talking about education? I

Thomas D'Eri: think it varies a lot state to state in New York where we were growing up and at the time that Andrew was growing up, there, there wasn't a lot of support. The school district provided some really great teachers.

Those stay through the age of 22 in New York, so I think across the country, you would actually look at New York as one of the better suited states to, to support their entire population of people with autism, but it still really wasn't enough for Andrew. He had to get a lot of outside support that my family was just able to pay for.

I think today a lot of it probably would be covered in insurance. I don't believe it was when we were kids. In Florida, where we currently reside there's a lot less support a lot more of it comes from outside the system. And it's one of those things where I think going forward we'll see a lot more a lot more outside organizations getting involved because the school system is really not built to support most people, especially people that think differently.

And I, I don't think in my opinion, it does a great job really empowering and developing like the unique skill sets of people with autism. Thank

Srini Rao: you. So this is going to seem like a somewhat funny question, but we had a woman named Shelly Brander here and she had a son with autism and she was telling me about the thing that he was obsessed with was maps.

And she said he's like a human GPS system, basically, I was like, wait, so when you guys have Google Maps or Siri, she's no, he gets pissed. He was like, if we don't use him. So I'm just curious, are there things that, you know, about your brother that just make you laugh, like funny moments that are

Thomas D'Eri: similar to that?

Yeah, totally. So Andrew's special interests are dinosaurs, which is like number one. And then he would, he also there were, he had this, I don't remember what it was called, but it was this like, like Windows 94 game that would have, that had this like 3d version of the human brain. And it was like a fly through where it would talk about all the different parts of the brain.

And he memorized every single part. The amygdala, the neocortex, the brainstem, and he would just go through. Like, all the different different parts of the brain and he

,

was like seven at this point. And I just remember watching him do this what is he talking about? And he would do that.

And then he loved the Museum of Natural History. That was his spot. He memorized that entire place, like the entire floor plan, where every exhibit is, what he wanted to see, the since I said dinosaurs were really his thing, like the tour guide scripts, he would memorize that, and so you'd go there with him, and he just had this place on lock, like he knew where to go.

He'd deliberately navigate us around places that he didn't want to go. He'd be like, nope, let's take a left here. And they're like, why is he doing that? It's oh, he just didn't want to go see the blue whale. Okay.

Srini Rao: So you could effectively be a tour guide for the natural music. Yeah, exactly. So I guess that raises a question, what is happening in someone's brain when they have autism?

I'm curious about the brain science behind this.

Thomas D'Eri: Yeah candidly, I'm certainly not really an expert in autism. I think really where I think our, what we've learned is how to work with people with autism to make businesses better and make our organization better. But I think that, like when you really, you read Steve Silberman's work is really great, the book Neurotribes, and it's really the brain is functioning just differently.

The different, using, a lot of times, different neuropathways to come to the same solutions. Really like, when we talk about neurodivergency in general, there's fundamental ways that people with ADHD, people with dyslexia, people with autism, they all think in a fundamentally different way.

A lot of times that comes with really unique and interesting advantages. I was reading one of Malcolm Gladwell's books and he talks about how there's like this really disproportionate amount of people that have dyslexia that are super successful entrepreneurs. I think that makes a lot of sense.

Like he said in the book, you wouldn't necessarily wish that on anyone. Creates this constraint in life that Forced them to really just become tremendous problem solvers and a lot of cases really good listeners And I think you see the same thing with a lot of people with autism It's the many of them become successful because they've learned to be different and embrace that and play to their strengths Yeah I remember, I know exactly what you're talking about.

Srini Rao: It's a section, I think it's in David and Goliath, if I remember correctly, on desirable difficulties. And he was talking about David Boyce, the trial lawyer, and you're thinking, wait a minute, this is the one guy you hoped to God you never receive a cease and desist letter from because he apparently obliterates people in court.

But you think to yourself, wait a minute, how the hell did this guy get through law school when he can't read? And yet he's one of the most successful attorneys in the world. I think every tech company in Silicon Valley uses

Thomas D'Eri: him wild. And there's Elon Musk is another example of someone who now identifies as having autism.

And there's like a lot of these examples of these incredibly successful people who are successful really because they do think differently. I realized that context mattered so much. Like for me, ADHD was a huge disadvantage in the corporate world, but as a writer, as creator, I can do things at a speed that I couldn't do in the corporate world simply because I can focus.

Srini Rao: I could, that's the funny thing about ADHD. It's not an inability to focus. It's an inability to focus on things you don't give a shit about.

Thomas D'Eri: Yeah. It shows you like, okay these are the things that I want to really focus on and the rest of it, I need to figure out a way to work around that.

Yeah Dad Howell in

Srini Rao: his most recent book, ADHD that boredom is basically kryptonite for people with ADHD.

Thomas D'Eri: That makes total sense.

Srini Rao: Talk to me about what prompted you to write this book and what the impetus was.

Thomas D'Eri: Yeah. Yeah. Like I said we started this business Rising Tide Car Wash as a means to employ Andrew and we set the goal pretty much from day one that we wanted to employ people with autism for 80% of our staff.

And that created a really interesting constraint, I think, on the business from a design perspective because we really had to. Think about every aspect of the business, how we would do it in a way where it would empower our staff with autism. And through the years as we we started in 2012 and we bought this one crappy car wash in Parkland, Florida.

That was washing like 35, 000 cars a year. And today we have three locations, about 90 employees with autism, and we're washing about a half a million vehicles a year. And in kind of the process in building this organization and making it successful, we had to really reinvent a lot of the organizational processes that typically exist in businesses.

And at some point we realized that The problems we were solving, they weren't autism problems, they were really general business problems that our employees with autism were just allowing us to see a lot easier than your normal staff would let obviously, traditional hiring processes aren't going to work for people with autism.

Those are primarily these like social tests and neurotypical social skills, which You know, inadvertently weed out a lot of people with autism, so we had to build hiring processes that were really concrete and clear and focused on results and trying to drive down into what do you really need to be successful in this role and how do we identify that as well as like building clear processes and clarity into every aspect of the organization because our employees with autism need that.

Typical employees need it too. But they may just soldier through the ambiguity and just not do their best work and at some point probably just stop caring about the work pretend like it's still going great. Where our employees with autism are pretty much just going to tell us like, this doesn't make sense or like I'm confused or they're going to show you really clearly that they're confused.

And you have to try to drive that clarity deliberately and immediately into the organization. So doing things like that, as well as we had to reframe the way that we lead our team. So when people would struggle, we'd find that. We needed to really immediately ask ourselves, is this person failing the business or is the business failing them and going through a design process based on generally seeing like now the business is failing them and how do we design around the team members that struggle the most and that would lead to a lot of interesting insights.

So we we were able to. Solve some pretty cool business problems by working with people with autism. And we wanted to really share that with specifically other small, medium sized business leaders, because so often these are the organizations that struggle so much with finding really great talent and differentiating themselves in these crowded marketplaces.

And we felt that this was a really interesting strategy to, to pursue to help do that. And. Also would hopefully create a lot more job opportunities for people with autism. That was the goal of writing the book. The book is called The Power of Potential. How a non traditional workforce can lead you to run your business better.

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Srini Rao: lowercase. Go to shopify. com slash unmistakable to take your business to the next level. That's shopify. com slash unmistakable. One of the things that you say in the opening of the book is that Rising Tide succeeded because our employees with autism uncovered every one of those hidden problems with startling, sometimes unsettling speed.

Talk to me about that. How did they do that and what were the problems? Yeah. Why is that such an

Thomas D'Eri: advantage? They were like there are so many of those moments through the the evolution of this business. I think the one that comes to mind the most isn't it's a story that's shared in the book is.

Every Monday night we have a bunch of staff in to do our weekly maintenance and some of our deeper cleaning activities. So we'll grease all of the bearings, we'll change oil filters. We'll do you know we'll do a thorough cleaning inside the car wash conveyor. We'll scrub the arches down.

And so there's a bunch of tasks that have to get done. And early on when we were rolling this Monday maintenance out, there wasn't a lot of structure to it. It's okay, you have, we have these things we would just tell people what to do over the course of the night and get it done.

We had this one team member who his name's Robert and he just got real frustrated one night. And at first it looked like he was just like disengaged and not working. So the manager was like, Hey, Rob get to work. And then he got frustrated even more and he started to lash out and it would have been easy just to say screw you, Rob.

You're being difficult. In fact, that manager did give Rob a write up that night. But when we learned more about the situation, when I got to talk to Rob and understand, it's he just didn't know what he was supposed to do. We had a lot of difficulty figuring out what, where he needed to prioritize.

He was given a list of a couple different things to do. And he just froze and that gave us the insights like, okay, we need to really make this much clearer. We need to make training for each of these tasks. We need to put it up on a board so everybody knows what to do and what order they need to do it in.

And that made it easier for everybody else to do these tasks. This car wash was better maintained and cleaner because of it. And those are the types of things that like that start generally with an employee like being either visibly upset or just. Clearly struggling that would launch us into these different design challenges.

And I think those exist in like that particular thing, that ambiguity of what to do over the course of a day that exists in every organization. And it's an advantage because we get to solve those things where most organizations. The leaders may not be really aware of where their teams are struggling because when you ask them, they're just going to tell you yeah, everything's fine.

Don't worry about it. We're doing great because they don't want to look incompetent or maybe it's just hard or not, or maybe a little frowned upon to say, I'm struggling with X, Y, and Z. Even if you're trying to create a culture that is really open, still, I think people struggle with that where our team either couldn't hide it because it was a really challenging for them.

Or B, didn't feel like they needed to hide it because a lot of people with autism are just going to be blunt and tell you what they mean, even if like socially that isn't the right way to be or quote unquote right way to be in a certain situation. So it really are the neurodiversity in our business and then getting to work with our team members through those issues, it really helped us fix a ton of things in our organization.

Now,

Srini Rao: one of the things that I think really struck me that you said in the book about the typical talent process, which is what most of us have gone through, you say. The typical talent process I just described is deeply flawed. That's not just my opinion. That's data. 46% of all hires fail within 18 months, according to the 2005 leadership IQ survey.

And as the guy who has been fired from every job I've ever had, I completely agree with that. But Explain to me how we change that.

Thomas D'Eri: Yeah. Yeah. So most hiring processes are just, they're riddled with bias in every from top to bottom. And the way that we try to eliminate or at least reduce that bias, I'm not sure it's totally possible to completely eliminate it.

But to try to get to the truth of what in a specific role, that specific context do we need, I think we tend to try to take a a one size fits all approach to this is what talent looks like, I have this idea of what talent looks like in my head, and that applies to you. Anyone that I'm hiring, generally that's someone who looks like me, talks like me, acts like me, maybe has a similar educational background as me and by throwing that away and being like, okay, Johnny is really good at this role.

I see. What does Johnny do? That's really good. Okay, I need someone. Who has a growth mindset. I need someone who is able to be assertive in this role, is able to speak their mind. I need someone who in the case of our aftercare associate roles has the physical ability to do this task, this manual tough task over and over again.

By trying to identify those things and then designing either work tests or a a sample day or addition for these roles. We can much clear, more clearly see if somebody is going to be good at the role. So most easy example for me to give is how we interview for our associate roles, which is the roles where the team members are actually just cleaning the vehicles, right?

So we need someone who can follow directions, who's willing to follow the process, who's physically able to do the job and who's sensory able to be in this loud, hot environment. So we bring a team member or a candidate out. into the environment. We show them kind of the core things. They then go and do them back for us.

And by doing this and going through this scored assessment, we're able to generate a score based on how many times it takes them to do each task. And we're able to get a pretty good probability of is this person going to be able to do this job. And We then for other roles that are maybe, let's say, a management role, we're looking for different things.

We're looking for some character traits. We're looking for someone's ability to persevere through difficult situations. We're going to ask them the same questions and ask them Both questions about their past experience, like a time where they persevered through a challenging situation or a goal that

,

they were able to achieve that took a lot of work.

Or we're going to ask them more like a scenario based question. If somebody was struggling in this situation, how would you handle it? How would you help that person work through that challenge? And by asking those same questions, having a scorecard associated with it, having multiple people doing.

Those interviews were able to just quantify a lot of the things that we're looking for many of our roles and that I think is the beginning of the process to unbiasing the interview procedure. And the great thing about using something that's like a work trial or a job audition or the structured interview that I just talked about a second ago is that it can be a really good platform to improve on.

So as we run into different issues in the work environment, we can add different questions, add different tests to try to make sure we don't. Hit that same issue again. So a few years ago, we realized that in some of the management trainees that we were bringing on, personal responsibility was a really key part of the role.

Somebody who's willing to take personal responsibility for their actions, and that's the way they approach. Okay, so we need to add a series of questions to try to get at that idea. And we had to reiterate those questions and the first questions weren't very good. And then we kept going through them. But eventually we were able to create a set of questions that allowed us to get an idea of, okay, what is your degree of personal responsibility in your general mindset.

And we do those things over and over again. And I think that we've just been able to really improve the way that we hire based on all these procedures to the point where for our associate roles, we're hiring our employees with autism to actually work on the cars. We've only had three team members fail due to job performance over the past 10 years that we've been doing it.

And no one fail due to that functional job performance in the last four years. It's much, it's a much more accurate system. One

Srini Rao: thing that you say about this is that average workplaces are dominated by good enough management, disengaged employees, and general mediocrity tend to get blamed on other things.

Most frequently, the employees themselves. But then I think what you go on to say which really runs counter to this idea of firing fast is that firing fast may be the least effective way to prevent trouble down the road. It's holding you back from solving problems. That stand in the way of your growth as a business.

It's also teaching employees to hide their mistakes for fear of appraisal. And at most organizations miss that people in the bottom tail represent the biggest opportunity to improve performance in your company. That's so counter to so much of what we learned, particularly in Silicon Valley.

And the funny thing is I've heard the exact opposite. And in some cases I feel like it does make sense to fire fast, but talk to me about that. There are places, there are a lot of people that I. Keep So let me ask you this.

Thomas D'Eri: When tasking a customer about the luxury brand, who should get the job for free?

Obviously, they should ask a prospective parent, but the question is who should get the job There's really no need to go through these things. After all, stripping a clothing tag off your name so easily giving it to someone It's, in fact, it's much easier to just blame it on that person. It doesn't make you evaluate why they're struggling.

It's nope, Johnny just sucks and it's Johnny's problem. I'll replace Johnny with a new person and that's gonna solve my issue. I won't have the problem anymore. But most of the time, At least in our environment, most of the time, there's some contextual reason why they're struggling. And Johnny can tell you if you sit there and listen to him and watch him do his work, what is making his job hard, why is he having these challenges.

And by doing that, you often uncover insights that will make your workplace better for everyone else. Because if you can help Johnny be successful, everybody else will be an easier job for it. And then it will translate to. More reliable systems, easier to train systems, you're able to bring on people with less work experience often when you do these types of things.

So it has this ripple effect in the organization, not to mention from a cultural perspective, when we take an approach of firing fast, it makes it very scary for an employee to voice a struggle, right? Because they're not doing good. And I know here. Like we just fire people when they're struggling.

So I'm going to keep quiet and I'm not going to let anybody know and hopefully they won't realize I'm, I suck at this or I'm having real difficulty with this. And we just sweep our problems under the rug and it really runs counter to another thing that is a big deal in in Silicon Valley and really throughout the business world right now, which is psychological safety, the feeling we can feel safe enough to speak up and ask questions, have dissenting viewpoints.

Or when we're having failure that it's framed as learning and I think that this approach to immediately, I'm immediately going to be disciplined and not just blame it on this person. My first step. is going to be to understand from their perspective why they are failing is a really good practice.

Certainly, we've had plenty of employees just they don't really care and they're or they're not really this is not the right role for them. And you still have to fire certainly not saying that we can't we should we don't fire anyone or that you shouldn't fire anyone but the first step should be this honest evaluation of the situation.

Having

Srini Rao: a predominantly autistic workforce, what competitive advantages has that given you in your business? And then also. What have been the challenges that

Thomas D'Eri: you guys face? So I think the advantages that we immediately saw were we had a staff that really wanted to be at work, which that's very different than most car washes and really most retail organizations, right?

Yeah. You have people that want to be there. And they also and there's an interesting debate in the autism community right now, whether this is based on the way that we work with children with autism or if this is something that is really neurologically, this is something that they people, a lot of people with autism tend to, but is this idea of structure and routine and schedule.

So many people with autism have a desire for structural routine and schedule and in a process driven business like a car wash. You want people to follow your process, routine, and structure, where many neurotypical employees want to do it their own way. It's yeah, whatever I'm not going to do it that way, I'm doing it my way.

And that leads to inconsistent service and every organization, every service driven organization knows that, but it's really hard to get people to conform to their processes. Where our employees, this is how, this is like the key support, how they're successful in the workplace is having these clear and consistent processes.

So you know how to, what to do in a certain situation and then they really follow them. So those were the immediate things a little later once we started to really talk about our mission to the public was. The thing that really differentiates us as a business. So there are plenty, every other car wash ventures say every other car wash in the world is competing on quality, speed, price, and memberships are a big deal.

Different like the led lights that you see in the car wash, all these like fun little things that in a lot of cases they are important, they do add to the experience. But it's all the same thing. It's very different difficult to stand out and have people really choose you or have any real loyalty to you as a car wash where we tell a story that really resonates with people and they come to our car wash because of that they drive further because of that they pass other car washes on their way because they care about what we're doing.

They talk to their friends and family in a positive way about their car wash. Yeah. That's not normal. Normally if you're talking to your friends or family about a car wash it's because they screwed up so bad that you just have to vent. It's, I'm laughing because there's a car wash right by my parents house that I go to.

Srini Rao: And my dad always hates it when I go there because he's we we lease Mercedes. He's just go to the Mercedes dealer. I was like, dad, I'm not going to spend five hours at the Mercedes dealer to get a better car wash. He's yeah, but that car wash sucks. Exactly. The one that we go to that's the way we talk about

it.

It's funny because yeah, in a typical sense, a car wash would typically be considered a commodity business. I don't think most of us. Speak the way that your customers probably do about their car wash. Like to me, all I can tell you is when the car is dirty, I take it there. Beyond that, I don't have any sort of emotional attachment to the place or any semblance of loyalty to it at

Thomas D'Eri: all.

And there are so many businesses like that, right? That, that just your local dry cleaner there's so many of these types of community businesses that it's just a commodity. Like you go there because you have to. And I think that's where there's a real opportunity for a lot of these organizations to try to invest in a workforce.

Maybe it's people with autism, maybe it's a different barrier group, building a brand and a story around caring about people and bringing in talent that's different. We're not the only ones that have been successful at that. There's this coffee shop that's now across a lot of the Southeast called Biddy and Bo's.

They were founded with a similar mission of employing people with disabilities in their, for pretty much their entire workforce. They've been really successful. There's this company called John's Crazy Socks, which sells, they sell socks online. Can you think of a less, like a more commoditized thing than socks?

And John really liked socks. They built this cool story around it. They sell a lot of fun socks to like a bunch of really cool different brands. And he's, they've been able to build this business because it has this unique story. And I think that there's a lot of opportunity for entrepreneurs to differentiate themselves by leveraging a story like that and really investing in the people that work for them.

Srini Rao: You may be familiar with her work, but Catherine Hogue started Defy Ventures, which basically her entire mission is to use venture capital to invest in people who've been in prison. And turns out they're brilliant entrepreneurs.

Thomas D'Eri: Yeah. A lot of it's misplaced entrepreneurial spirit.

Yeah. No, I

Srini Rao: can tell you this from having visited San Quentin. We had a guy named Chris Redlitz here as a guest on the show. He's a venture capitalist who started a tech incubator inside of San Quentin prison. And I remember going there and just watching. How these guys worked, the apps they were building and all the things.

And it, you are blown away by the fact that you define this person by this one moment in their life where they've done something so horrible. I remember shaking hands with the guy, what are you in here for? And it's Oh, murder. I was like, you don't look like a murderer. And I remember it was the nicest guy.

Like I sat with him talking to him. He'd read my book and absolutely loved it. And I was like, so what are you in here for? He's ah, I shot a guy who used to be a stockbroker. I was like, what?

Thomas D'Eri: Yeah. Damn.

Srini Rao: But but yeah it was mind blowing to me how brilliant these guys were. And it just made me think it's yeah, I can see why people want to hire them.

Thomas D'Eri: Yeah. So much is contextual, right? We end up in these situations that we want to judge a person, obviously murder is an extreme case a little bit less extreme is we have a lot of daily failures or life failures that. We ourselves tend to blame on our own innate skills when it's often the context around you that's driving so much of your behavior.

We don't step back enough to think about that. And that's something that we try to do in our business, which is like we talked about like not firing fast. That's it's the same type of concept is that so much of behavior and so much of success and failure is driven by the context of the situation that We really need to try to get curious and get interested and be humble with the idea that well, we don't really know what's going on until we really look at it.

And then still we may not get a full picture, but at least we'll get a better one. And that process, I think, is something that we really need to do if we're going to build successful organizations, really support people effectively. And scale our organizations. I

Srini Rao: remember Trevor Noah on his final daily show appearance had this monologue.

And one of the things that he said that stayed with me so much so that I clipped the note was that context is

Thomas D'Eri: everything. It really is. We say context is king in our business all the time. I

Srini Rao: think that's so true for so many different things. And something I beat like a dead horse here on the show this year.

It just made me realize it's yeah, in every context, I used to think about my parents advice to do something stable and secure as rigid and closed minded. And then I realized that advice was based on a context of having grown up in a country where their outcomes were binary.

It was either poverty or

Thomas D'Eri: security. Exactly. Exactly. It made sense. They were trying to protect you, but it didn't serve you because it's a different context. Yeah,

Srini Rao: absolutely. Wow. This has been really cool. I really appreciate you taking the time to join us. So I have one last question for you, which is how we finish all of our interviews at the Unmistakable Creative.

What do you think it is that makes somebody or something unmistakable?

Thomas D'Eri: I think our, I'm sorry, can you say that one more time? Yeah. What

Srini Rao: do you think it is that makes somebody or something

Thomas D'Eri: unmistakable? I think it's the willingness. to really be authentic to themselves and be able to frame things in a way where it's helpful.

I think perspective can often be the most important thing in life and in entrepreneurship. I loved in your book how you talked about Laird Hamilton and fear where fear can be.

And I think that I can do it. You can look at it as I'm afraid I'm not going to do something or you can look at it as naw, let's go. This is going to help me get through this and be sharp. And I think that framing of things in being able to say, okay, this is challenging, but what's the shadow side of that?

What's the opposite? And how do I think about things? That's essentially what we did in our business. We. We had a constraint 80% of our staff was going to have autism. Could look at this as that's never going to work. Why am I even going to try? Or you can walk down the path and you can eventually see that, no, this breeds innovation.

This is a really dynamic way to differentiate our organization, but it all comes down finding the right perspective.

Amazing. Thank you again for taking the time to join us and share your story, your wisdom and your insights with all of us. Where can people find out more about you, the

book, your work and everything that you're up to? Yeah. So you can go to our website, risingtidecarwash. com. You can find our book there as well.

And you can find the book, the power of potential, how a nontraditional workforce can lead you to run your business better at anywhere that you buy books on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, anywhere. Amazing.

Srini Rao: And for everybody listening, we will wrap the show with that.