We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Brittany Chadwick. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Brittany below.
Brittany, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Talk to us about building a team – did you hire quickly, how’d you recruit the first few team members? Any interesting lessons?
We here at Puzzle Piece Pastries are a bakery that hires and train adults with autism and other disabilities. We have a large menu selling breakfast, lunch, ice cream and of course pastries!!! We are located in Gainesville, GA and have been open for one whole year!!!
There are many difficulties we all can face in life and employment is one of them. Unfortunately, people with autism have a higher rate of unemployment. If you look at any statistics available you have the lowest unemployment rate being 50% the highest being 80%. Of course that depends on who was surveyed but clearly there is an underlining issue that we are hoping to help solve with our bakery. We believe that together we can all bake a difference!!!
When we first started, we were nervous as there was a lot of paper work, a lot of repairs needed and we weren’t sure how quickly we would find enough people who would be interested in working at the start. And we were very wrong. To this day the best post we have ever had on our facebook page was the first we are now hiring post.
We started the hiring process a month before opening our doors. At the time all our bakery had was the six board members. And some of them were living in different states. With the help of our amazing community we received more applications than we know what to do with. We first hired our manager team and proudly shared their stories if they allowed as some did have disabilities. We took our time creating a menu and going over how to best organize our pastry case. We had an outside chef and specialists help us create a space safe for all. For example, we have very loud timers that are located on the counter that can’t be removed. We made our drive through bell much louder. We change our seasonal pastries but not the order in which they are show cased.
Once we had a leadership team we did days of interviews and the interviews were different than many companies. Sometimes a hurtle individuals with disabilities face is the interview process. You are in a new space, with new people who are asking questions and they have a correct answer in mind. The chair, lights, or even choice of music can be very over stimulating. Not to mention eye contact is considered a visual way of showing you care or are listening but eye contact can be a difficulty for some. So we allowed individuals to bring their families or parents with them. If there was a question they couldn’t find the answer too they had the ability to look at their safe person and they sometime would phrase it better than us or help start answering and allowing their child to take over when they could. It didn’t hurt them if they had no prior work experience. All had the opportunity to be chosen.
We were able to hire 20 individuals all with a variety of disabilities. Again we can’t thank the community enough for helping us build our team. We have had members of the team leave us for other job opportunities that were presented after gaining some work experience but we try our best to continue to have 20 disabled individuals on our payroll at all times. We also have a large number of volunteers who we train and are always hoping to add them on to the team and or help them find other job opportunities.
Our training process is one that never ends. We have such a large menu because it allows us to teach multiple skills. Sandwiches, breakfast, pastries, ice cream, cashier, cleaning, greeting, drive through, and more. Before we opened our doors to the public we had a long training process to find where everyone was the most comfortable. We also had a week long soft open where we invited people to try some food items and help our team practice for opening day.
If we had to do it again I think we would have better prepared for the number of applications we needed. We would have also tried to have our reward program up and running for the opening.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
Puzzle Piece Pastries is a nonprofit bakery dedicated in providing training and jobs to individuals with autism and other disabilities. We sell and serve pastries, breakfast, lunch, ice cream and coffee. You can stop in, order online or use our drive through. We are located in Gainesville, GA and are open Tuesday through Saturday 7am-7pm. We believe together we can bake a difference for those in our lives with disabilities by creating a more inclusive workforce and society.
I myself got into baking when Covid was here and places were shutting down. It was during this difficult time that I found baking can bring a slice of joy to people going through hard times. My love for my craft was started when I saw the joy I can bring. During the pandemic I learned how to bake a variety of cakes, cookies, and other treats. It became my passion and I wanted to share it with others. Luckily I happened to meet Mr. Matt Kahn who founded Puzzle Piece Pastries. I expressed my desire to open a bakery and he shared his story about raising a child with autism and the fears you have as a parent. What work will they find? How will he take care of himself when I’m gone. His son also shared a sweet tooth and then the idea of Puzzle Piece Pastries was created. A place that can create joy not only in the treats we make but in the opportunities we could provide.
Not only do we hire those with disabilities we also celebrate them. We have an amazing birthday program open to teachers and other non profits where you provide us with an individuals name, likes, and cake flavor and we provide a free birthday cake that was provided by our supporters. We also share some details and ask the community to help us make birthday cards for the individual. So that they know they are wanted, liked, and have a community behind them. Our founder knows just how hard it is to get individuals together to celebrate a disabled child and no one should suffer the pain of feeling alone on their birthday. It is a wonderful program that is truly helping people.
We also have a program for school’s and their special education department. We just started this program this year and we are so very excited! Basically we will help schools raise money for their special education department. We will sell them our treats at cost for them to sell at events like high school football games to earn a profit for their departments to help fund field trips, needed supplies and more. We bake and package them. We just require the students in the special education classes go to these events themselves and sell them with the help of their teachers and or aids. We hope this helps start giving these students valid job experience and it may even lead to an interest in baking or cooking. We also hope it brings together all students and creates an avenue of acceptance and bonding that may not have been their before. Perhaps creating new life long friendships.
We are most proud of the success stories we see in the bakery. We have seen an employee come in afraid to speak and become the most talkative. We have seen employees need an aid when starting to being able to do the job without any assistance. We have seen an employee start regaining some muscles in an injury just because they moved more do to the job. We have seen real friendships being made. Some employees and volunteers even hang outside of work. We have seen some people frustrated thinking they are incapable of a task to becoming some of the best at the task. We don’t get to share every success story as it is up to our employees but we can say they are the reason we are grateful to be able to come to work every day.
Any advice for managing a team?
The best peace of advice I can give anyone is to embrace diversity. When you are building your team you should strive to have people of all different backgrounds because you can learn so much more than you think. A good idea can come from anywhere and people all need different management styles. Some work better with lists, others prefer being shown an example or just need to verbally hear what you need described. Some work better in groups others as an individual. Take the time to get to know your staff, appreciate they work they do, and don’t put a limit on what you think they are capable of let them show you their limit. Remember everyone makes mistakes and if your team is afraid that they will be fired for one wrong question or answer their work is hindered by their anxiety, and fears. Of course there are some mistakes that can’t be forgiven but there is a balance that needs to be met. You know a happy worker is more likely going to create happy customers, stay at your company for longer, and bring in more business as a result. When the morale is low the work performance suffers. Your job title or pay level doesn’t mean you deserve to treat your lowest level employees as less than. Be diverse and just be kind. Your business fails with no employees.
What’s worked well for you in terms of a source for new clients?
Our best source of new clients has to be from word of mouth and social media. We are still very new and aren’t even breaking even at our bakery. This is very normal for new companies. So when we have a customer leave a positive review or share their experiences on their favorite social media pages we are very grateful. Every day we have someone come in that has never visited our bakery before. All we can hope is you all enjoyed your visit and will come again. We have seen the most success on Facebook page and hope we can turn some of our followers into weekly or daily regulars. We want to be around for years and maybe open more locations across the state or in other states, but for anything like that to happen we really are relying on our community. We hope those who can’t visit can become monthly donors or share some of our social media posts as it really helps us grow. We have a very long waitlist so we know we are needed and we are hoping to grow and meet that need one day. We know it can take years but we hope slowly we will become a staple in Gainesville and a need to go stop anytime someone visits Lake Lanier.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.puzzlepiecepastries.org/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/puzzlepiece_pastries/
- Facebook: https://www.tiktok.com/@puzzlepiecepastries
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/PuzzlePastries
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNNalrDTYIEndlc4Hbg0GrA
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/puzzle-piece-pastries-no-title
Image Credits
Amanda Lynn Herring