Rising Tide

Tom D’Eri is the Co-Founder/COO of Rising Tide Car Wash a social enterprise that employs over 80 individuals with autism in a successful car wash business.

Tom is also the Co-Founder of Rising Tide U an organization dedicated to teaching others how to build businesses that empower diverse talent. In partnership with University of Miami, Tom created the first step-by-step online course designed to help parents learn how to build sustainable businesses that employ their loved ones with autism. As of June 2020, Tom’s students have created 143 jobs for people with autism in 20 businesses.

Tom is a recognized thought leader in the autism employment field, speaking at Fortune 500 companies and international conferences. He also sits on the Autism @ Work Roundtable at Disability:IN.

Tom is a Forbes 30Under30 Social Entrepreneur, a summa cum laude graduate of Bentley University in Finance and Economics and an Uncharted Global Fellow.

84% of adults with autism are unemployed even though research shows that many in this group bring incredible talents to the workforce.

We address this by employing individuals with autism for 80% of our staff in a class-leading car wash organization. Rising Tide Car Wash boasts a net promoter score of 87 compared to an industry average of 63. Our two locations service over 300,000 customers annually making us the most successful car wash company in our market. Our car washes are the proof of concept that designing an organization around neurodiverse talent is a competitive advantage. We then share our learnings through Rising Tide U so that others can follow our lead.

Our society wastes an incredible amount of human potential because organizations don’t know how to use it or aren’t motivated to do so. Our project provides both a case study and a path forward to change this.

We’re working to solve the 86% unemployment among people with autism in the US. According to the CDC there are 5.4 million adults with autism living in the US, 2.21% of the population. It’s likely that these statistics are similar across the world.

It’s estimated that the cost to US society for lifetime care of adults with autism is $126 billion annually. This would be greatly reduced by lowering unemployment among this group.

This issue exists because we look at autism as a disability that requires sympathy instead of a valuable diversity and we design organizations to only value a very narrow definition of talent. The disability perception drives down the demand for this talent pool even though 45% of people with autism have no intellectual disability and only 16% of people with autism have a significant intellectual disability. Further, hiring processes, operating systems and cultural norms among the vast majority of organizations are biased against people who think and act differently. Most hiring processes rely on the way we feel about a candidate instead of qualifiable assessments of skill. Most companies operate with too much ambiguity around expectations and processes. And most company cultures overvalue extroversion and social acuity.

Rising Tide proves the business case for hiring people with autism and provides guidance on how to design more inclusive organizations. We do this by operating a class-leading car wash company in a highly competitive market and subsequently sharing our learnings through educational products and services.

Rising Tide Car Wash employs individuals with autism for 80% of our staff. Both locations wash over 150,000 vehicles per year which is in the top 10% of car wash volumes industry-wide. In order to effectively operate this business, we’ve needed to design every aspect of it to empower our employees with autism. This includes unbiased hiring processes, clear expectations throughout every employee touch point and a culture that prioritizes coaching, feedback, accountability and leverages human-centered design principles to solve organizational challenges. This approach has led to a profitable business and the development of a third location.

Rising Tide U shares what we learn through educational products and workshops. We’ve developed an online course to help parents of children with autism build businesses like ours. Tom is currently writing a book targeted at helping small and medium sized businesses improve by redesigning how the define talent and empower their employees.

We serve adults with autism. Many employees join us when they’re leaving high school. Our employees without intellectual disabilities generally use this opportunity as a first job. For employees with intellectual disabilities, we provide long-term employment.

When we develop systems, processes and tools we always involve the operators, testing and refining based on their stated and observed needs. Our employees with autism are the ultimate judge of a solution’s clarity and effectiveness.

Rising Tide addresses our constituents needs through income, employability skills and community. Our training program teaches skills like time management, proactivity, growth mindset and accountability. Our combination of real-world employment experience, training and coaching has enabled over 75% of our alumni to leave for new jobs or higher education. We also provide a supportive community for the 94% of young adults with autism who experience bullying. Being part of this community and being valued as employees drives significant improvements in our employees’ confidence and pride.

New job opportunities in the community are formed as local business leaders see how capable our employees with autism are. Rising Tide U creates new jobs through the creation of new businesses and increased capacity of existing businesses to employ neurodiverse talent.

As described, Rising Tide exists to close the opportunity gap for people with autism. Yet, Rising Tide U’s work is broader than that. Through speaking, workshops and an upcoming book, we’re popularizing a new concept: designing organizational systems around the needs of extreme users leads to better outcomes for everyone. Extreme users have the same needs as everyone else just more apparent. This is true for most groups who are traditionally left behind. We’re proving that inviting people with more significant needs into organizations and design systems to empower them reduces bias and increases access to talent, innovation and purpose.

My brother Andrew has autism. My father and I saw that though he developed into a capable young man there were no employment opportunities for him. In fact, it seemed like the social service system actually disincentivized adult day programs, like the one my brother was enrolled at, to find their clients employment. At this point, in 2011, we decided to act. My father was already a successful entrepreneur for twenty years and I had just graduated college.

Around this time my father was visiting our local car wash in New York where he had the idea that Andrew could be a successful car wash professional and maybe many more people with autism could too. We analyzed the car wash business along with several other concepts and eventually concluded that my father’s entrepreneurial gut was right. A car wash seemed structured enough for many people with autism to excel, employed enough people to build a community and was tangible enough to communicate our message of autism empowerment. This started an 18-month journey with my father that led us to Florida where we found some great partner who helped us piloted the concept and subsequently purchased our first location.

I grew up watching my brother Andrew struggle because of his autism. When he was young he’d have frequent meltdowns. Throughout our childhood I witnessed him work harder than anyone I knew to overcome his challenges, spending three hours every day after school in tutoring and therapy. This paid off as he grew into a capable, agreeable and hardworking person. When he finished high school, it seemed like all of his work wasn’t going to translate into a full adult-life with a career, community and purpose. This was heartbreaking and I knew I had to act.

As Andrew’s older brother by 20 months, I observed his struggle to transition into adulthood while I was at college. I’d been interested in entrepreneurship from an early age, idolizing my father who built several successful businesses during my childhood. While studying business I became passionate about social entrepreneurship. When the opportunity presented itself to start a business that would employ Andrew and others like him, I jumped at it. Today, my passion for this work has only grown. My purpose in life is to build systems that empower everyone to be their best and I get to exercise this on a daily basis.

I’ve dedicated the last 9 years of my career to Rising Tide and have worked directly with thousands in the autism community. During this time, I’ve learned what it means to be an ally to the neurodiverse. My voice serves to make the business case for why it’s smart to employ neurodiverse people, not to be a neurodiversity expert. The neurodiversity experts are the neurodiverse themselves. I’m here to create inroads for them. Through my business education and my time building Rising Tide, I understand the small business community very well and can make a compelling argument for them to hire neurodiverse talent. I’ve honed my public speaking and writing skills over the years to effectively deliver this message and have become a sought-after speaker.

Much of the work that needs to be done to empower people who think differently is around redesigning business systems. Through a combination of self-education and real-world experience, I’ve built a strong skill sets in human-centered design, rapid prototyping, primary and secondary research and partnership creation. These skills have helped me work with my team to create systems that help them do their best work. These include an unbiased hiring system, simple real-time business intelligence tools so team members with intellectual disabilities can make good operational decisions, a visual and clear workplace and a blended and integrated training program. With these systems and a culture of coaching and accountability, we’ve developed a team that is capable of scaling our efforts as well.

At Rising Tide’s inception, I had no management experience or mechanical competence. Yet I was tasked with running an old run-down car wash while leading a team of 40 people. These issues were compounded when the only experienced manager we had left after 6 months. I was a stressed-out mess, working 90+ hours per week just to keep the car wash running. My authoritarian style of management was totally ineffective causing the team to fail in all phases.

I learned to ask for help and find the resources I needed to turn the operation around. Through expert guidance and dogged determination, I went from not knowing what a wrench looked like to being able to fix anything at the car wash. I used this experience to build a class-leading technical training program for our team. Today I rarely have to fix things myself because the team is so competent.

Through voracious reading, I learned how much more effective it was to lead by asking questions, coaching, providing clear feedback, admitting when I messed up, owning my mistakes and asking for help. Learning these techniques made me a more effective leader and helped me develop managers who also lead this way.

We recently experienced mission creep by way of managers constantly correcting employees’ work themselves instead of coaching them to do better. This limited employee growth and put undue burden on the managers. To fix this, I publicly acknowledged my role in the problem, admitting that I’ve been guilty of this behavior and of sending the message that this is what leadership looks like here. I then laid out a vision for what our culture would be like in a “perfect” state and asked my team to work with me to get there.

Together we redesigned systems to clearly set expectations, gave staff better tools to do their work and implemented accountability practices that made key coaching behaviors part of the daily work.  These efforts led to quicker employee development and helped managers frame challenges as learning opportunities. Everyone started taking more pride in their work and felt more competent.

While I initiated this change process, my team’s buy-in was what propelled it forward. My role was to reinforce the importance of these changes, let the team know when they were on the right track and provide them with the resources they needed to get the job done.  

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Rising Tide is the only organization in the neurodiversity movement designed specifically to both provide operational proof that employing people with autism is a competitive advantage and actively share its learnings. The car wash business serves as a living laboratory to test new concepts and design new solutions. By achieving coveted business results, Rising Tide is able to “walk the walk” and get other businesses and entrepreneurs interested in hiring people with autism. In the car wash industry, we’ve gained attention due to our drastically lower turnover rate, incomparable brand equity and ability to get new car washes approved in communities that otherwise wouldn’t want one.

Rising Tide U then shares our organizational knowledge and generalizes the lessons to be broadly applicable. The most innovative message of our knowledge sharing work is the power of designing organizational systems for extreme users. This is the central premise of Tom’s upcoming book, Shine! How to Succeed by Leaving Average Behind. By leveraging Rising Tide’s story, stories of other leading organizations and cutting-edge research, we’re broadening the value of hiring neurodiverse talent for all organizations and specifically SME’s. Most organizations suffer from a series of seemingly invisible problems that keep them from achieving great results. Extreme users, in our case employees with autism, make those problems visible and are our greatest ally in fixing them. By re-framing their needs from accommodation requirements to insights for building better systems we not only create more inclusive workplaces but higher performing businesses in general.

Prior to launching Rising Tide and again prior to writing his upcoming book, Tom conducted design research interviews to understand people’s perceptions of employing individuals with autism. Although these studies were 7 years apart they both captured a similar insight; autism is looked at as a disability that requires sympathy instead of a valuable diversity. Further, there are many academic papers and anecdotal findings from autism employers that the vast majority of individuals with autism are employable and excel in jobs they’re assigned. Therefore, the underlying assumption of our theory of change is that we’re solving a demand problem.

To effectively create demand for neurodiverse talent we believe we must first prove the competitive advantages of employing this group as well as decrease the barriers organizations face in employing them. To do this, the activities we engage in are operating a thriving business that employs people with autism for 80% of our staff, speaking and media relations, and workshops and educational products.

Our immediate outputs are direct employment of the people the car washes hire and awareness from people who visit our car washes, watch our media spots and hear Tom speak. At any given time, we employ between 70 and 85 individuals with autism. Our media pieces have reached over 300 million people worldwide and Tom’s spoken in front of over 15,000 people.

Our medium-term outputs are increased job skills and self-confidence for our employees with autism and increased interest in employing people with autism. According to independent impact surveys conducted by local autism professionals, our employees roughly double their self-confidence and self-efficacy. Further, they learn fundamental job skills like time management, taking feedback, growth mindset and stress management through formal training and on-the-job coaching. Tom has also trained over 2,000 people on how to build more equitable business systems.

The long-term outputs are increased employment opportunities for people with autism and more equitable organizational systems. To date, Tom’s students have created 20 businesses that employ 143 individuals with autism and at least two other car washes have begun employing people with autism due to Rising Tide’s work.

Rising Tide currently serves 78 employees with autism, 69 employees of color, 76 youths and 31 employees from low-income households. We also have 171 alumni with autism and 69 neurotypical alumni, most of which leave for college or new jobs where they take the lessons learned here and apply them throughout their careers. Over 75% of our alumni with autism leave for new employment or higher education. Rising Tide U also has 4 current entrepreneurship students who are building businesses to employ people with autism. Tom has 4 speaking engagements scheduled this year which should reach over 1,200 participants.

In one year, we should add 10 new jobs due to opening our third location. We should have 12 current employees with autism leave creating openings for 12 new people with autism. There also should be a large increase in our training activities and Tom’s speaking due to the launch of his book. We’ve received preliminary interest from HarperCollins Leadership, Random House and Harvard Business Press. If a major publisher buys the book we’ll gain significant exposure, a book tour and an estimated 8 – 12 large speaking events. We believe this book will be our entry point into building a fully operational training organization serving dozens of clients each year.

In five years, we’ll double our employment base to over 156 employees with autism and add over 80 alumni with autism. We’ll have a complete suite of training services with full-time staff serving at least 80 clients per year.

Our goal is to double our employment opportunities for individuals with autism by launching the first financially viable business model run 100% by neurodiverse talent. We plan to embed this talent model within the express-exterior car wash business model. This business model utilizes a streamlined service offering that is simpler to scale and is the preferred model of the large car wash funders.

We believe that committing to 100% neurodiversity will provide a powerful constraint to push us to further improve how we support our team. It will also provide a strong platform to communicate how capable neurodiverse talent really is. Most importantly, it will give our employees a unique opportunity to work in a team where everyone is like them, creating a unique network of peer support. By the end of the 5-year period our goal is to close a round of funding for an aggressive national expansion.   

During this period, we also plan to build out a fully functional training organization that creates jobs for people with autism in client organizations, serves as a thought leader for designing equitable organizations and enhances the car washes. We envision an integrated approach where the training business utilizes the car washes as living laboratories. Thereby learning from the car washes while enriching them by prototyping new systems, tools and training interventions.

We believe that this “do and share” impact model has the potential to close the opportunity gap for tens of thousands of neurodiverse people.

Our largest challenge is access to real estate deal flow. We compete for highly coveted properties with much larger corporations such as McDonalds. These corporations often have access to opportunities before they are listed on the market. We also have limited experience in real estate sourcing which compounds this challenge. Without the property needed to build our stores on, we can’t effectively execute our expansion plan.

Growing our car wash locations is capital intensive as each project costs between 3.5 and 5 million dollars including real estate. Thus, we need larger scale mission-aligned funders than we currently have to grow aggressively. Without larger funding partners our resources for R&D to develop systems enhancements that support our team are limited to reinvested profits.

For Rising Tide U, we have limited experience and knowledge of how to build a world-class training organization and create a sustainable business model with these services. We also have limited resources to build out training tools and products. The culmination of these issues creates barriers to having our desired impact both in the effectiveness of our services and the ability to scale them.  

To overcome our real estate deal flow barrier, we plan on building a network of real estate professionals and land owners. We also plan on building partnerships with shopping center developers and anchors like big box retailers, gyms and large gas station chains. These companies often are approached with off-market opportunities and don’t need all of the property available.

By leveraging the express-exterior business model we’ll not only be more appealing to car wash industry funders but will also increase the volume of properties available to us because this model requires a smaller footprint than our current design. We’ve already been approached by several large funders and family office but haven’t been able to present the right opportunities to them. We believe that our express-exterior model will have ample funding interest and we’ll be able to find a mission-aligned funder.

For Rising Tide U, we plan on finding mentors in our current social impact networks and tapping into new networks to help us learn how to build a world-class and sustainable training business. We also plan on working with several experienced independent contractors beginning around the time of Tom’s book launch. This will lower our exposure before demand starts to rise due to the book while still giving us access to strong talent. We’ll then reinvest any profits from speaking and workshops to build high quality training tools and eventually bring on full-time employees.

• SONNYs Car Wash Factory – Our equipment manufacturer, chemical supplier and technical support organization. They help us keep the car washes running effectively. They also bring their clients to our sites to show our model in the hopes they may adopt it in some way.
• Paradise Bank – Our primary funder who specializes in SBA Debt.
• Disability Opportunity Fund – Our second largest funder. They provide us with a second mortgage at our Parkland location which has been crucial to funding our second and third locations.
• Center for Autism and Related Disorders (CARD) at University of Miami – CARD support our employees and their parents on issues beyond the scope of employment. They also have been a key collaborator in our entrepreneurship training work.
• Duree & Co – Our PR firm which helps publicize our efforts.
• Writers House – Tom’s representation for his literary work.
• UNC Chapel Hill – Conducting a study on the long-term outcomes of our employees with autism.
• Broward County Public Schools – Our primary recruiting partner. Many of our team members come to us from Broward County Public Schools during their transitionary years.
• Dan Marino Foundation – An important recruiting partner.
• Taft Foundation – Has supported our autism employment work.
• Uncharted – Tom and John are Global Fellows with Uncharted. Uncharted supports our work with network connections.

Our car wash business generates revenue from the sale of exterior car washes and interior cleanings. Our exterior washes range from $6 to $20 and our interior cleaning packages range from $20 to $42. We also offer free self-service vacuums to all customers and an unlimited subscription package for our best exterior wash at $39 per month. We provide these services by utilizing the latest technology, sustainable chemistry and the best people. Each car wash serves roughly 50,000 households in a 5-mile radius. This is a hyperlocal but general customer base, serving any vehicle owner. Washing your vehicle is an essential part of the vehicle maintenance process. Customers choose to maintain their vehicles at our car washes because it is higher quality and faster than the competition and directly contributes to the employment of individuals with autism.

Our financial model directly feeds our impact model. As the number of vehicles we wash increases so does the amount of staff we need and thus the more individuals with autism we employ, train and help develop into competent professionals.

Our training activities generate revenue from speaking fees, the sale of online courses, live workshop fees and consulting contracts. Our online course is $495 and serves first time entrepreneurs who are looking to build a sustainable business model around the skills of individuals with autism. Our target client for speaking, workshops and consulting are generally organizations with a focus or interest in employing neurodiverse talent.

Our impact model is embedded into a well-established business model. Our car washes are profitable and thriving businesses all from the sale of high-quality car wash services. To scale this business, we will utilize a combination of re-invested profits, commercial debt and equity investment.

Our training business currently is operationally sustainable through the sale of online courses and speaking fees. We plan to grow this business organically through re-investing profits as demand for our services rise.

I am not comfortable sharing specifics in this application. I will share more information privately if necessary.

To summarize our financial performance, we generate in excess of $3,500,000 in revenue annually, operating at a net profit.

We’ve raised over $6,300,000 in debt for our two operating car wash locations. Our third location has funding fully committed. 80% of the project cost will be funding through SBA debt, likely $3,200,000. The equity portion of the project cost will be covered by operating profits our existing locations.  

Our training organization generated over $20,000 in revenue from speaking fees and the sale of online courses. This sum was enough to cover the expenses of providing these services.

Our third car wash location has funding fully committed. 80% of the project cost will be funding through SBA debt, likely $3,200,000. The equity portion of the project cost will be covered by operating profits our existing locations.  

Beyond our immediate growth plans, our longer-term plans will include larger funding rounds to build or buy more car wash locations. Each location is expected to cost between $4,000,000 and $5,000,000. To fund these locations, we will utilize debt for 60% to 80% of the project cost. To fund the remainder of the projects we will work with family offices and private equity firms. Our goal for the next round of funding is to add an additional 5 locations in Florida by 2025. We plan to begin the fundraising effort in early-2022. After this round, we plan to grow more aggressively through acquisition of existing car washes throughout the country and building car washes in select markets.

I am not comfortable sharing specifics in this application. I will share more information privately if necessary.

To summarize our financial performance, our budget to operate the car wash business is approximately $3,000,000. This includes all relevant payroll, inventory, repair and maintenance, research and development and taxes and fees. Our budget to get approvals and complete the plans needed to build our third location is approximately $250,000. This includes legal fees, application fees and permits, civil engineering, architecture and consulting.

Our budget to operate our training business is $10,000. This includes digital ads, software to operate the course, virtual speaking engagements and workshops. At this point payroll is completely variable based on actual demand for speaking and workshops. COVID-19 has greatly impacted this business line but we estimate an additional $5,000 in payroll expenses for 2020.

The Elevate Prize can provide us with resources that will greatly improve our ability to scale. The support of Joseph Deitch, the MIT Solve and Elevate Networks and the Elevate Prize Foundation’s two-year program can help us overcome our real estate deal flow barrier. We believe this opportunity would provide us with real estate connections that could both help us access viable properties and build our capacity to more effectively access these properties ourselves through mentorship.

It also seems likely that there are funders in the Elevate Prize network that are both interested in real estate backed investments and aligned with our mission. The prize money would give us resources to invest in building more empowering systems for our team and creating higher quality training resources for others to follow our lead. It would also significantly ease the financial burden we’re incurring from building our third location.

Winning an Elevate Prize would have a dramatic impact on our training activities. We feel that the Elevate Prize Foundation’s two-year program could play a large role in helping us build out our knowledge sharing activities, create world-class training services and design a sustainable business model around these efforts.

As noted throughout this application, a large portion of our impact comes from influencing other organizations. The generous media, marketing and influencer support that the Elevate Prize offers could drastically improve our ability to communicate the value of employing and empowering neurodiverse talent.

Scaling our car washes requires a network of insiders who can alert us of properties as they become available and organizational competency in mining off-market opportunities by identifying real estate owners who may be interested in selling their properties. We need partners to help us with both of these areas.

To scale our business while maintaining the integrity of our mission we need to find financial partners that have both significant resources and mission-alignment.

To scale our knowledge sharing activities we need partners who can help us develop world-class training resources, elevate our platform to get our message out more broadly and guide us in designing a business model that delivers this impact sustainably.

• RILA – This industry organization has deep relationships with most large retailers in the US. RILA could connect us with influential real estate developers that would greatly improve our ability to access properties. RILA could also play a significant role in helping us spread our message to the retail organizations in its community.
• Wawa, QuikTrip, Sheetz – Large gas station and convenience store operators who often have extra property in their developments which we could build car washes on.
• LA Fitness, Lifetime Fitness – Large fitness centers who anchor shopping centers which often have outparcel opportunities where we could build car washes on.
• BJs, Costco, Walmart, Target – Large retailers who anchor shopping centers which often have outparcel opportunities where we could build car washes on.
• IDEO – Leading innovation design firm who could help us build systems that empower our employees with autism, build great training resources and tell powerful impact stories.
• Acumen – Mission aligned impact fund which could provide us with capital to scale, excellent resources on designing for impact and leadership development.
• Halloran Philanthropies – Mission-aligned impact fund who could provide us with multiple funding mechanisms to scale.
• Barclays – Institutional funder with a strong focus on impact investing.
• Calvert – Institutional funder with a strong focus on impact investing.
• Good Jobs Institute – Leading organization on designing high preforming retail organizations through providing good jobs. Good Jobs Institute could help us improve our operations as well as share our learnings with their network of retailers.