Entrepreneurship and Autism: How One Family Is Breaking the Mold

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• 00:04

  We have consumers and clients leaving us crying, you know, so excited that this exists and, you know, willing to tell all their friends what car wash has.

• 00:14

  That, whether it's a change in the sensitivity to diagnosis or whether there's actually something happening in our culture, in our society, in our genetics, the rate of diagnosis of autism has absolutely skyrocketed in the last generation, generation or two.

• 00:33

  It's alarming to a lot of people.

• 00:35

  Today's guest, Tom Dieri, had a little brother who was diagnosed with autism when he was three.

• 00:39

  Now, Tom and his brother are actually like grown adults right now out in the workforce.

• 00:45

  And that's actually pretty unusual to say that they're both out in the workforce, because what Tom shared with me is that once people with autism, you know, what he called age out of the system, whether it's education, all sorts of services at a certain age, generally early twenties, late teens, even, all these resources and programs of support no longer become available, and you're kind of left on your own.

• 01:06

  And something like 90% of people living with autism end up unemployed.

• 01:11

  So he wanted to change that and at the same time create some sort of vehicle to let the community know that autism is a condition.

• 01:20

  But the people living with autism, they're real people with real feelings and amazing abilities and to contribute to the world.

• 01:28

  So he and his dad actually tried to figure out an interesting business to start to create these things.

• 01:35

  They ended up building both a venture that serves the community, and one of their first actual businesses is a car wash.

• 01:43

  And they realized that that actually fit extraordinarily well with the skills and abilities that somebody living with autism had.

• 01:50

  The car wash exploded and at the same time brought both local and national attention and really started a conversation around autism and introduced the local community to the fact that, hey, these people are not all that unlike you.

• 02:05

  They are different in some very meaningful ways, but at the same time, they're beautiful human beings.

• 02:10

  Really excited to be able to share this conversation with you.

• 02:13

  I'm Jonathan Fields.

• 02:15

  This is good life project.

• 02:20

  Really good to be hanging out with you, actually.

• 02:22

  Your story is really fascinating.

• 02:24

  So I'm excited to sort of go into and explore a little bit.

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