So the idea of Rising Tide Car Wash came because my brother Andrew has autism, and when he was
turning about 21 years old, we were really trying to figure out what was Andrew gonna be able to do
with his life. And it became really clear, really quickly that in order for him to lead the full
adult life that we knew he was capable of, that we were gonna have to take action as a family. My
father, John D'Eri and I started this business as really as a means to employ him. And it's kind of
grown from there. We bought our first car wash location back in 2012. It was a struggling car
wash in Parkland, Florida. It was only washing about 35,000 cars a year. And over time,
we were able to renovate it, really make it an excellent location run by 80% people with autism.
And the business took off. Today, it washes over a 170,000 cars a year, and we were able
to take that success and open two more locations that are just as successful as the first one.
This is my first job, so I was a little bit kind of nervous, but as I seen people motivating me,
telling me that it would be easy not to worry about it, and now I'm really confident now.
[Thomas] They get pushed. They might feel like I can't do this, but they're reinforced by our
supervisors and by our managers to keep going. Keep trying, you can do it. And over time, we've
seen transformation among many of our employees to be able to say, "Hey, not only can I be a
good employee, but there's other stuff I wanna do." And then they can go get that job because
they have something on their resume now. We've had over a hundred people over since we started leave
us and move on to other employment, and that's because of the confidence that they gain here.
I pretty much learned how the customers on the outside world behave and how to deal with them,
how to deal with customers. Of course, I'm still working on that, but it just gives me a good,
you know, insight on how customers are in real life and how to deal with them.
I think the thing that really sticks out the most about this whole journey is that our employees
with autism don't require anything special. They just require a really well run business,
the same things that any employee would need. They just might need it a little bit more. By
designing objective hiring, by being deliberately developmental in the way that we train our team
members. And when someone is struggling, by looking at how the business is failing that
person, not how that person is failing the business, we've really just built a better
operation for anyone that is in involved in it. We're able to now take, let's say a really
excited recent high school graduate or someone who's currently getting an associate's degree
or something like that. And we're able to turn them into a manager in like three months. And
that's because of how well we've really focused on designing things to work effectively. We just
opened our Coral Springs location in July of 2022. And that location's really unique because it's
actually run 100% by neurodivergent employees. We've simplified operations, we've made things
really clear, really consistent, very streamlined, and that's allowed us to be able to do that.
I've been working at Rising Tide Car Wash for a few years. It's been a really fulfilling
experience and has really helped me move forward in a lot of areas of my life. This is a business
that is very accommodating to our needs. You get a lot of places where you find that you
need to meet very lofty expectations, whereas at Rising Tide Car Wash, you get a lot of the
sense of they want to know what you can do and how best you can do what you can,
as opposed to asking you to do more and more and more. It's a matter of setting boundaries
and then pushing those boundaries in ways that are constructive instead of destructive.
Our employees with autism, they absolutely, positively need
structure and clarity in the expectations of the role, in how they do a role. But when they
have that, they're exceptional employees. But every employee needs that. Every employee needs
clarity When there's ambiguity in a role, we tend to focus on the wrong things or get frustrated or
stressed out for no real reason. And so we need to frame the things that people with autism need,
not as accommodations, special accommodations for this person, but as insights into making our
businesses better for everyone who works there. For Andrew, this has become a community for him.
He works four days a week. He loves the people that he works with and more than anything else,
he's really proud that he's the inspiration for this business. This is for the first time for many
of our team members. They really have a community of peers that have had similar lived experiences
that they have, and they're all striving for the same type of goal within the organization.
Recently we did a team event, our Christmas party, and we promoted one of our neurodivergent team
members into a supervisor role. The atmosphere of how absolutely ecstatic the whole team was for
Shaun to be able to move into that role. It was incredible. Shaun was so excited that he actually
lifted me up over his shoulder to celebrate. And that's the type of commitment that we have
from our team members, but also the type of really supportive community that we have in our culture.
I felt excited. I felt like, oh, this was never gonna happen to me, but here I am,
I'm a supervisor. I have more confidence now than I did when I first worked here
at the Rising Tide Car Wash. And it's due to the fact that I'm used to customers now,
and I'm used to working and like the amount of training,
the amount of years of experience being here, it's made me feel comfortable with working.
I hope, when people come and visit us, first thing that they realize is that
we've got happy and engaged employees who are doing a professional job and a really good
service. And hopefully that will show them that people with autism can be exceptional
employees for any organization. On a busy day at this location, we'll wash well over 1,000
cars. That's a lot going on in an 11-hour day, and it's run almost entirely by neurodivergent
team members. And that should tell you that the capability that people with autism have has been
radically undervalued. And that's what we really want people to take away when they come here.