FC213: Career Development

Cary Griffin: [00:00:19] And there are some websites you can go to. PassPlan.org would be one of

them where you can see past funded PASS plans. PASS is Plan for Achieving Self-

Support, and it's under the Social Security Act. It's been in the Social Security Act for 20

or 30 years now. If you want to look at a PASS calculator, go to DB101. Disability Benefits

101. And I think it's .com but it might be .org. That's the California version of an online

calculator. And it'll explain PASS. You can't use the numbers for Pennsylvania because

California has a different SSI supplement and whatnot, and they have different Medicaid

rules. But all the same, it'll give you the conceptual framework.

You also want to go to SSA.gov and download "The Red Book". And it's called "The Red

Book" because it's red. And it's actually Social Security for dummies like me. So, it's kind

of written that way. So, it's actually written in English and you can actually sort of

understand it.

I'm sure you all know that there's two different benefit streams, right? There's SSI and

SSDI. SSI is the poverty program. You have to stay in poverty to -- you know, you can't

have more than $2,000 in resource limits and some other deals.

And then there's SSDI which is the insurance policy part, right, which means that you or

your family paid in, and you have a disability and now you're collecting on that insurance.

There are a lot of folks that are dual beneficiaries or concurrent beneficiaries who get both

an SSI check and an SSDI check. Those people are like gold because that's the perfect

PASS plan. You could write that PASS plan this afternoon because the math will always

work. Almost always work.

There's a lot of folklore about Social Security and people make terrible decisions based on

folklore around Social Security. You are always, I would say 99% of the time, you are

always mathematically better working if you're an SSI recipient than not working. Period.

And it doesn't matter how many hours you're working. There's this, you know, I can only

work 10 hours a week. You know? That also comes with the disability piece. You get that

a lot with people with psychiatric disabilities. My therapist tells me I can only work 10

hours a week. I always ask what happens at 11? You know? It's like why is 10 magical,

right?

Same thing with Social Security. Tell me what happens. Well, I just know that they lose

their benefits. Or I'm going to lose my Medicaid. Losing your Medicaid would be a big

deal, which is why Medicaid has reformed that and why Social Security has worked on

that and it's very difficult to lose Medicaid these days.

Rehab counselors probably know what the state threshold is. What is it, $35,000?

Something like that in Pennsylvania? So, you'd have to go over 35,000 before you lost it.

Buy in's not in Pennsylvania yet, is it? Medicaid buy in? Is it? It is? Okay, cool. Excellent.

Excellent. Excellent.

So, people can buy in for pennies on the dollar then and get that. So, that's great. A lot of

states don’t have that yet. So, that's good to know.

I don’t do a lot of the Social Security work in our office. There are a lot smarter people and

people who like to do it, and I don’t really like to do it.

I will say if you're running a community based rehab program, a community rehab

program, that people all hear a lot of times that well, people in here only get SSI and it's

hard to write a PASS plan using SSI if you've got no other income coming in. And that's

true. The problem is, is that about 30% statistically of people served in a community

program are concurrent recipients. So, they have perfect PASS plans. So, you're talking --

in Pennsylvania, you're talking millions of dollars in the hands of the consumer, right, to

write this PASS plan.

Then there's the other 30% who are just straight SSDI and with a little tweaking could

have a PASS. The guys on SSI, you got to get them a job first or get them some money to

shelter in the PASS. So, there's a lot of practicality in that. I've always through that VR

should use it as a similar benefit. You know? Leverage that, maximize that benefit and

then hit the rehab bank for the rest of it.

One of the reasons why a PASS plan and why Social Security is important when we're

talking about self-employment is this idea of the SSI of the poverty program. And it's one

of the reasons why we really pushed self-employment for SSI recipients.

[00:05:08] And that's because in the '90 amendments, I think it was in the '90

amendments to the Social Security Act, somebody at Social Security was really smart and

wrote this thing called, "Property Essential to Self-Support". It's a little clause in there.

Somebody in Baltimore was sitting there thinking going geez, you know, to have SSI and

Medicaid, you always have to be below the $2,000 resource limit. Which is why you see

people, like, who own 16 DVD players at their group home. Because somebody's

misinformed and they're making them spend down.

Now, think of all the cool things you could do with money, but you got to go -- in California

you go to Disneyland for a couple days. That's how you spend down in California. Here

you buy DVDs or DVD players.

So, the goal there is to maintain your Medicaid and to maintain your SSI eligibility, which

is a really important thing. Right? Keeps people alive and whatnot. But what Social

Security said was geez, what if you actually -- what if somebody on SSI actually owned a

business? It would be really hard to run a business on $2,000. Or less than $2,000. So,

they created this thing.

Now, under the resource limit you can own a house and a car and a burial plot. Which is

why case managers are always telling people to buy a burial plot. I always like to tell

people that's the last thing you need, literally. People will figure it out. It's not your worry.

You know, get a hooker and a weekend in Vegas, it would be much better than a burial

plot. Don't waste your money on that.

But we continue to buy burial plots and things like that. People never own houses and

cars because they can never get the down payment together because they always have

to have less than $2,000 in their bank account on the last day of the month.

So, Social Security realized that and said geez, you know, if you run a business, business

is all about cash. You got to have more than $2,000 cash to run a business. So, we're

going to wipe that $2,000 resource limit out for a small business owner who gets Medicaid

and SSI.

So literally, you can have unlimited resources in your small business, not in your personal

account but in your small business bank account, a checking account. It has to be a

checking account. You can have unlimited resources as long, and this is the caveat, as

long as it relates to running your business. But that's a great caveat because you can't

prove what I'm going to do in the future. Oh, yeah. I got $16 million in there because I'm

going to buy the United States next year. Prove that I'm not going to do that. Pretty hard to

prove, right?

So, we have never, in 15 years of doing self-employment, had anybody audited for having

a lot of money in their accounts.

Now, because that money's coming in they're still paying taxes on it, it's still affecting their

cash benefit, right, but it's not taking eligibility away. And so, that's a really important

piece.

So, when you've got somebody in that situation -- those of you who are parents be

thinking about that. How is it that I work around this loss of benefits as my kid gets older

but wants to grow equity in a business to be able to own a house and a car?

What you can do with a PASS is that you can buy things that make you more employable

or that move you down the road to employment. You can go get a carpenter certificate.

You can go back to college. We've had people go to law school on PASS plans. It's pretty

rare, but it happens.

Again, cars, all kinds of different sorts of equipment for businesses, and for -- you know,

to get jobs. Everything from buying work boots to 4-wheel drive pickup trucks. Again, it's a

negotiation with Social Security.

And the numbers have to work. The numbers aren't going to be the same for everybody.

There are work incentives, folks who will do free benefits counseling for you all over.

Today, Pennsylvania certainly has a bunch of them. So, I would not move forward without

a benefits analysis if I was working with somebody. And as a parent, you definitely want

that information. And you want it before school ends. You want to see what's going to

happen.

You know, a lot of kids aren't getting Social Security who are eligible for Social Security

while they're in school, and then they have the added advantage of the student earned

income exclusion so they can make more than they will when they turn into an adult. So,

there's some financial advantages to this. So, again, getting that little bit of information is

pretty important. But we could spend a week locked in this room just scratching the

surface of Social Security and what they don’t tell you.

Talk about discovery a little bit as a vocational strategy and discovery's not terribly well-

known around the country. There's only a couple of us who teach it and who are using it.

There's a lot of people using the word, but they're basically applying it to person-centered

planning and it's not a word change. It's a different strategy. It's altogether different than

person-centered planning, but it's based on person-centered planning strategies.

[00:10:18] Person-centered planning is an interest-based program. You know, we ask you

what you like to do on the weekends and it's great for figuring out where people might live,

how to get more friends, what to do in their spare time, but person-centered planning

really doesn't work for employment because it leaves out the skills and the trial and the

informational interview and the whole job development piece it kind of leaves out. It leaves

out job analysis. It leaves out the negotiation strategies. It leaves out job creation. It

leaves out the economic development portion of a person's career. And so, it doesn’t work

terribly effectively for employment.

So, discovery is kind of person-centered planning on steroids, focused on the employment

parts. And it doesn’t really focus on much else than that. It is a very time-limited approach,

the way that we teach it.

Now, it's different for kids. You got a kid in school, the school career can be discovery.

You got all those years to start building skills and adventures in the community and school

is where kids belong, too. So, you've got all the in-school kinds of cool stuff to do and the

community service and the volunteering. And when I say volunteering, I do it very

guardedly because in the adult world, volunteering has taken over in many states as the

substitute for employment. And there's no data that shows that volunteering leads to a job.

It just doesn’t work because if I'm getting the milk for free, baby, I ain't paying for it.

So, we want to be very careful. Volunteering's been used as an excuse for not doing

employment. And so, I use it very guardedly. I volunteer when my other financial needs

are met, and I can volunteer. I don’t volunteer to get a job.

Now, everybody's always got an exception to the rule, and I'll buy that. There are

exceptions to everything. But volunteering almost never leads to a job. Almost never. If

you disagree, show me the data, because my data's very different than yours. So, just as

a caution.

Community service, I think that makes a lot of sense. Again, not as a substitute for work.

We do it and we work. And paid work. Work is about pay. So, very important part of that.

What we're finding, and this is where I will say that I made up these data, but I've worked

for two universities. I'm allowed to make up data. We made it up because we don’t know

what else to do. When we started doing discovery -- discovery is not about -- again, like

we talked about this morning, it's not about the dream job. It's about getting you used to

working. It's about getting you out there in something that matches who you are today and

hoping and putting in sort of this capacity to grow. Something that's not a dead end, but

something where we're always asking, what's the next job? But not waiting for things to be

perfect to make it happen. If we're always waiting for people to get ready, nobody's ever

ready to work, right? Because we're all ready to work.

So, we try to find something that matches those vocational themes that are emerging in a

person's life. Get them active, get them out there working, because nothing predicts future

success than getting active and doing and staying active. So, that's a very important part

of this.

What we found when we started doing discovery, and the roots of this -- the other group

that does a lot of discovery is Michael Callahan, who's one of my best friends and is a

genius. And he and my wife actually work together a lot. And Michael has come at this

from a different direction, but we both ended up in the same place which is a great thing.

We actually came at discovery -- we were working in Indiana about 15 years ago, helping

an organization take people directly out of the institution and directly into jobs. No day

program because they'd closed their day program. And they were de-institutionalizing the

big institution near them. And what we were finding was that we were working with people

with multiple disabilities, complex behaviors, and we didn’t know anything about them.

And so, we started this thing called, "Hanging Out with Intent". If you ever want to have a

rehab counselor not fund you, call it "Hanging Out with Intent", right? It was like the

dumbest thing they'd ever heard of, and I would agree. You know, that doesn’t sound like

an assessment to me.

[00:15:09] What we were doing was basically hanging out, going places where it seemed

to make sense to go with this person. We were missing the skills piece. It was person-

centered planning. And when we saw that it wasn't working, we started looking differently

at well, what's the verb? When we go somewhere, what are we doing? What's the

activity? And that's the hardest part about discovery is okay, I'm going somewhere with

somebody. What am I going to do?

The person says they like to cook. Great. Let's go cook a meal. Figure out where you can

do that. A lot of times it's in the home. That's a really easy place to do it. You know, figure

out well, where do we go get the food? If cooking's -- you know, is getting food part of the

deal or is it just the cooking?

So, in LA, working with a young lady who basically wants to -- has food -- she's great at

cooking. We know that. We've seen her in her kitchen doing stuff. We had her cook a

traditional Mexican dinner and then we threw a curveball. We said have you ever made a

pineapple upside down cake? And she says never even heard of one of those. So, we

had her make one. And she's brilliant. She loves to go shopping to get the ingredients for

what she makes. Now, that's not -- you wouldn’t have to do that to have a job cooking. But

there's another clue about her skills and whatnot.

So, all across LA there are these little neighborhood Mexican farmers markets. And so,

we sort of went out there with her and a video camera and said okay, you're going to

make empanadas tonight. Go figure out the stuff that you want to buy. And she's speaking

English to one person and Spanish to another and buy this and checking this out. And

boy, your cilantro looks old. And oh, these tomatoes look good, and whatnot. She's a

genius at this, right?

So, anyway. It's the verb. It's what are you going to do out there?

When we took Tim to the mall it wasn't just to go watch a security guard, it was to work

with a security guard. That’s sometimes hard to do. We do work trials sometimes.

But all in this period what we -- again, to get back to the data that I'm making up -- and

Michael has sort of agreed with us, at least conditionally. I don’t know that he would agree

in public with me. But if I gave you 12 weeks to do discovery, guess what? Takes you 12

weeks to do discovery. If I give you 8 weeks, it takes you 8 weeks.

If I look at what a traditional voc eval costs -- and again, we have to average this around

states because we work in a lot of states, it usually falls somewhere around $1,000 is

what I can squeeze out of most budgets. Whether it's a VR counselor paying for it or

whether it's a Medicaid waiver or whether it's somebody general fund or whatever, I can

generally get somewhere between 750 and 1,200. Generally, on average about $1,000.

Well, you know, the way that we structure it, discovery takes, depending on the person,

between -- and again, it's a moving target -- 20-60 hours of work in the community. And

the family visits and writing up the profile and all that. Start to finish, 20-60 hours over 6-8

weeks is what we're finding. But that's because we saw people taking 12 weeks and they

didn’t need 12 weeks. The idea is that if I started doing discovery on you, tomorrow I'm

going to discover something different about you. And on and on and on. And I can never

be done discovering with you.

So, what we've found is, is that in 6-8 weeks, once you're well-trained -- and it takes you

about a year of doing discovery before you're good at it, by the way -- at that point I can

say 6-8 weeks, if you're doing the job right, you got enough information to get this person

a job. And we've been anecdotally collecting that data for about 10 years now. Now, we

keep tweaking it. We keep getting better at it. It's not a done technology by any means.

But you should be able to write a vocational profile that a VR counselor or somebody else

can look at and go, you nailed it. You've got the ideal conditions of employment, you've

got the support strategies down, you know the best teaching methods, you've identified a

variety of vocational themes for this person, you've got a pretty good idea of the kind of

employers you ought to be doing job development with, and generally, you've also created

a working visual portfolio or representational portfolio that you can use in job

development. We generally do that on a laptop using PowerPoint.

So, again, 6-8 weeks with flexibility. Kind of depends on what your funder will do, right? If

you ask people -- when we started doing self-employment, our first hundred businesses

cost on an average $5,000. Microenterprise to the max. $5,000.

[00:19:57] Today? Man, you got 20 grand? We can figure out how to spend that for you.

Our average is probably closer to 15-20 today because we're better at getting money

today than we were 10-15 years ago. So again, it's one of those flexible variants, right?

It's like how much you got, that's how much it's going to cost.

But I will say from a funder perspective, 6-8 weeks is about enough. It puts you at about

the same hours. And again, it's not one person doing this. It's a team of people. And so,

one of the things that we teach is how teams work together. What we've found, of course,

over the last 10 years of doing this, is that most organizations don't understand teams.

They talk a lot about teams, but they don't operate in teams. They operate in committees.

You're the residential person. You're the vocational person. You're the case management

person. You're the parent. And you all come, protecting your resource or representing

your waiver or your residents and your thing there.

That's not what a team does. A team comes around and says we've got to get Eleanor a

job and that's all I'm focused on is Eleanor. And I need to figure out in the background my

waiver issues and my parental issues and my case management issues. I work for that

person right there. And that's why it takes a year to get good at discovery. And figuring out

that well, if you're on my team and I'm really into baseball and you understand baseball,

then you're probably the best person to get me into the locker room sorting bats. And

you're really good at greasing cars and I'm really into hot rods. So, you're going to get me

into the hot rod shop and I'm going to start doing oil changes for people. Or you're going

to give me a two-hour work experience changing oil. Whatever. We're going to use your

capacity, your social capital, and your skill sets to help me facilitate things.

Does that kind of make sense?

So, the team splits up the work. The other thing that's good about that is that you come

with a different perspective than you come. And so, now I can compare those things. You

saw this, but you saw this. Isn't that great? And what we start to see is that there's so

much more complexity than we ever thought in people. All right?

So, again, I passed out these CDs. I don’t know that everybody got one. If you're from the

same agency, you can share these. Everything on here, I think everything on here, is

available online if you go to our website. If there's something that you -- like, you go back

and you say, I wonder if they've got this? Email me and I'll tell you whether we've got this

or not. If not, probably know somebody who does have this.

But on here, and very shortly online -- it'll cost you a little bit, and here it's free. And if you

email me it's free. There is a curriculum that we wrote last year for British Columbia, and it

is a customized employment curriculum. It's five chapters and there's a chapter on

discovery. And it is a train the trainers manual, basically, curriculum. So, it's from soup to

nuts. It will tell you from start to finish how do you do discovery? And it's got the forms and

it's got the milestones. It's got everything that you need to go read it and do it. Really, it's

just a matter of practice once you've read it.

We work with a company called Essential Learning. It's EssentialLearning.com and we're

putting the curriculum up online so that people can study it. I think it's like $25 a session or

something. So, if you want to take that and get credit for it, you can do that. A lot of people

-- they're certified through a bunch of people.

But if you just want to read the chapter and you didn’t get a CD, email me. I will send it to

you. So, that's not a problem.

So, it's a very structured process. 6-8 weeks. If it goes 9, I'm not going to complain. Again,

in the first year you're going to be learning how to do this anyway. Generally, falls within a

variety of categories for -- by the way, don't go to your Medicaid folks and say well, we

want to get paid for discovery. Right? Just take your day program dollars and do

something with them. Or call it assessment or whatever you fund in Pennsylvania.

Everybody writes their waivers a little bit differently. They use different names. But it can

be evaluation, it can be community access. It could be lots of different things that you're

doing discovery under. Voc rehab in a number of states is buying discovery.

Florida, we have a major project going where we're training their vendors how to do self-

employment and part of the vendor training is how to do discovery. That has helped out

the VR counselors a ton in that way.

[00:25:04] We're in the process of training 800 VR counselors in Texas in discovery and

other things. Mostly virtual training for them. And then a couple other states that we're

working with on those things.

In Utah, the director of this VR in Utah has a son with autism. So, he gets this stuff right

from the start. A guy named Don Uchida, who's a wonderful guy. And we sat down with

him in one of our project sites in Salt Lake and we're explaining to him about discovery

and on the spot, he authorized the community program. We were working with 30 slots.

He said $1,000 a piece, basically. And the first 10 people who went through discovery, 8

of them got jobs. So, he was pretty thrilled. They're working on the others right now.

So, it's something that there's a precedent for. But I wouldn’t go in and call it discovery,

because that makes people's eyes roll back in their head because that's not in the manual

anywhere. Just go in and say I want to do this kind of situational assessment with people

or functional assessment. And that way you don’t have to get policymakers involved and

get their shorts all in a knot over some new word.

I never ask policymakers, like, for policy. Because then they write it and then you got to

live with it. When we started doing supportive employment there were no rules and there

was no funding. When we started doing self-employment there were no rules and there

was no funding. That's the best way to do it. Don't ask for funding. Just go do it. If it works,

the money follows. That's what we've found. And you get to write the policy then. We've

written more self-employment policy than probably any other group. Because people

come to you and they go geez, you actually started a bunch of businesses. Why would we

write the policy when you obviously know what you're doing? So, we get to write it the way

we want it.

In the states that -- we did a survey of all state VR policies. Pennsylvania, you know, I

haven't done a bunch of self-employment in Pennsylvania, so I don’t know the state policy

very well. At some point I've read it, because I've read them all. Which is really, really

exciting reading, by the way. But it's probably been five years since I read the

Pennsylvania policy and it's probably been rewritten three times since then.

In the 1990's when we actually did a research project at the research and training center

on rural rehabilitation, our researchers actually read all of the policies and out of 50 state

policies, 43 of them told the counselors to discourage anybody going into self-

employment. That's been changing. That's the great thing is that over the last 10 or 15

years, almost all of those policies have been rewritten. It's still not the happiest thing that

you can ask a rehab counselor to do. But that's good, because that means that we're still

in business. So, anyway.

So, there are various stages to -- this is where we are today. This'll change next month

probably. The stages to discovering personal genius. Home and neighborhood visits, that

comes first. Can't tell you how much we've found out by listening to mom's story for the

60th time. And that's what I hear all the time. If we go there, Madeline's going to tell us the

same story she's told us for the last eight years. You know what? Madeline needs to tell

you that story. And it's not going to kill you to listen to it.

The whole idea of the smooth listening that we talked about this morning, practice being

quiet is so intriguing to families. And to individuals that we work with.

We were working with this young lady who, after Katrina, had moved to another state and

relocated. And she uses a wheelchair and has a developmental disability. And she'd

moved into a new apartment. She didn’t know anybody. And so, we went over. We said

we're training staff, so we brought a couple staff with us to do an initial interview with her

and basically, we sat down, and I said now, we're not going to talk. This is not a typical

conversation. We're going to ask you to tell us about yourself and we're going to listen.

And so, Kathy starts talking. And she tells us about moving out of New Orleans and losing

her family. And just this dreadful kind of story. And then she talked about her work and

whatnot. And then she stops, and she stares at us and we just stare back at her. And then

she starts talking again because people hate silence. And so, she tells us some more.

And then after about 20 minutes she looks at us and she goes, you guys are freaking me

out. You know? She says in 40 years, nobody's ever listened to me this long. It was like

astounding.

And we hear that all the time. Nobody's ever listened to me. They come in with their set of

questions, they ask their questions, and then they go. And so, this listening really starts to

get you.

[00:29:55] The hardest part, and what you want to practice, it's very hard for people to sort

of maintain their silence. Because it feels awkward, right? And we tend to over reward

people. If you've ever worked -- you know, when you work with folks with disabilities, you'll

notice that if you're working intensely with them, training something, don't they stop and

look at you before they move? It's called cue dependence. They're looking for your

approval.

Everybody who's talking to you, whether it's in casual conversation or whether it's in a

formal, professional -- people stop and check in just to -- you know, it's just a common

courtesy to say, am I doing okay? Am I talking too much? What's hard for folks is to

practice not over rewarding. Not being over [indiscernible 00:30:40] I guess.

Give you an example. Craig and I, who's a guy I work with in Pasadena, we go out and we

do this home visit with this family. And this woman, living with her daughter and her

daughter has a pretty significant disability. And so, we introduce ourselves. Here's what

we're doing. We're trying to get her a job. So, we would like to sort of hear -- you know, tell

us about your daughter, basically.

And so, Craig's new to this. He's only been through a little bit of training. And she's talking

and she's going great guns and she's talking about how they're at the Catholic church

every night and they do these functions and that her daughter makes rosaries and that

she's -- all this cool stuff's going on. And then she says but you know, I think I can tell you

our secret. It's like oh, crap. She says every year we go to Las Vegas and we gamble.

And it was like great. That's at the point where you don’t want to really do anything more

than maybe just crack a smile or just a little nod.

Craig goes wow. You guys go to Vegas? Once he says that, what he does is he tells mom

Vegas is important. This is the stuff that I want to hear about. And so, mom spends the

next half hour talking about Vegas. Vegas has nothing to do, very little to do, with her

daughter. We're not going to Vegas to do discovery. Sorry. We're in Pasadena. This is

where we're going to stay.

Unidentified Male: [indiscernible 00:32:10].

Cary Griffin: Exactly. Right. Right. But a lot of times we've been taught to over reward people. You

know? And really, like Mark Gold said, no news is good news. People don’t need all the

rewards. They don’t need high fives. They don’t need good jobs, because after a while it's

meaningless. The task is the reward. Telling me about your story, telling me your story, is

the reward.

And so, when we over reward during discovery, a lot of times, not all the time, but a lot of

times we run the risk of derailing the conversation just because we've given a smile at the

wrong place and mom goes oh, shopping at Safeway is the really important thing that he

wants to hear about. I'll talk about grocery shopping. And we send that subtle message.

So, it's very hard. It's practice to be a smooth listener.

In a conversation, and especially in a negotiation, the person who's listening is the person

in charge. They're in control. And we always think it's the person talking who's in control,

but it's the exact -- if you guys all quit listening at this point? I'm done. You are totally in

control. When you check out, I'm done. And it's the same thing in a conversation.

You ever give somebody the silent treatment? Man, they'll do somersaults to get you to

say anything.

It's the same thing in discovery. Be nice, be cordial, but don't over reward. Don't say ooh,

tell me more about that. That's later after they're done talking. After you've given them

sufficient time to tell the story. Then go back and say boy, you know, you mentioned going

to Yosemite. Could you tell me a little bit about what Jennifer did while you were at

Yosemite? Just to pick up on that. You know? You mentioned that you've never seen

Jennifer more alive. Tell me about Yosemite. But don’t do that the first time she mentions

Yosemite, or you'll never get to the next nugget that's coming.

So, it's practice. Do it on your husband. Husbands are great for practice. They'll be really

confused. They'll walk around, they'll wash your car, they'll do all kinds of stuff.

We interview other people. We mine the social connections. Because how do people get

jobs, right? Over 90% of jobs secured in the United States are never advertised. The trick

is to know the person who's standing next to the person, right, who's just said don’t tell the

boss, but I'm quitting in two weeks. That's the real trick, right, is how do you know that

person? But mine that social capital.

A lot of places -- and this isn't really discovery related, but we don’t use our economic

power worth a darn in human services. In school districts, how many people on the school

board in their lives are in positions of power in their community? Most of them. That's how

they got on the school board. Most of them are positioned in their businesses to hire

people, to influence buying.

[00:35:15] How many school board members in their businesses hire special ed

graduates? Can you imagine how many people on the board of directors of Ford don't

drive a Ford? Zero. Well, they give them a Ford. So, you should give them a special ed

kid. Right? Congratulations. He's yours.

But we don’t use that. Schools don't do business like with the bank that hires special ed

grads. They don’t buy football equipment from the sporting goods stores that hires a kid

with special needs. Why aren’t we doing that? Why aren't we using our -- and not in a bad

way, but in a nice way. This is the way the world works.

How many of you in community rehab programs have boards of directors and your board

members don’t hire people with disabilities? How many of you keep your money, your

agency money, in a bank that doesn’t have any employees with developmental disabilities

or psychiatric disabilities? How could that be? Why would you do business with that?

That is one of the criteria I use in my personal life all the time. I go in and talk to my

banker, I got my banker to make a donation to our nonprofit. It's like no, I'm not putting my

money in this bank. We got one bank in town. I could've driven 30 miles to the next bank. I

didn’t want to. He's a nice guy. Gave us a check for $100 for our nonprofit. Eh, what the

hell. I'll hit him up for more later.

But use your power. Think about all the residential programs that buy gobs of food,

gasoline, vans, and they're not asking anything in return for that. Crazy. Crazy to me.

So, we observe skills and tasks in multiple environments. Again, what you're trying to do

is ferret out this idea of the vocational theme. The vocational theme is not a job

description. I think this is the hardest thing for people is to not think in job descriptions, but

to think in -- you know, rather than think about washing cars, we're thinking about

transportation. Yes. That's the job description.

We see the skills, we see the interest, all those kinds of things, but has the guy ever tried

to wash a locomotive? We don’t know that. If he likes cars, he might like airplanes. Might

not have anything to do with airplanes. Might have to be doing with getting out of town.

But guess what? We don’t care. We don’t speculate in discovery. That's the other thing. I

don’t care what your motivation is. I don’t care that you're avoiding me, I don’t care that

you're seeking attention. All I care is that I see this.

So, discovery is about observable behavior. It's about observable skills. So, I don’t need

to know your motive for why you want to do something.

One of the questions that I hate in discovery, somebody'll say well, I go bowling on

Saturday night and somebody'll go, do you like that? What do you do with the answer?

Yes. No. It's either that or stay home with the group home alone. It's, you know, it's

retarded bowling night. You know? Right? Well, that's why most people don’t have a

choice. We call it choice; it's usually a decision. Do I go or don't I go? It has nothing to do

with a choice. So, we want to be very careful about that kind of stuff.

We review the findings, we figure out the vocational themes, and again, I'm compressing

here obviously. We use a thing called the vocational staging record. You can use

whatever form -- yeah, you can use the back of a napkin. We did for many years just

trying to figure out what the forms should look like.

And then we do this career development plan. I think one of the biggest differences is, is

that we don’t move forward generally until we've got a list of 20 for each theme. That is 20

places where the career makes sense. And that really makes you learn your

neighborhoods and your communities. And again, you're off mainstream.

It's like I said this morning, you know, I live on a road that's two miles long. If you drove

down our road you would say it's a typical Montana residential neighborhood out in the

country somewhere. But knowing people, if you just knew one person on our road, you

would know at least half of the businesses on our road. I think there's probably one

neighbor that we don’t know and there's a guy in a double wide down the road. I think it's

a small -- I think it's a meth lab.

So, I'm not sure whether that qualifies or not. Right. Well, that's what I'm thinking. Just not

sure I want to go do job development there.

But you wouldn’t know that unless you knew somebody in that community, in that

neighborhood, that those were businesses and that you could generate stuff there. You

know, opportunity there.

[00:39:54] The Fredrickson's run, it's a husband and wife team, they run a little cabinet

business out of their garage. They have an unlisted phone number, they have no Yellow

Pages ad, they do no advertising. You can't find them. It's all word of mouth.

You guys know Jack Welch, the former CEO of GE? They did his cabinets for his summer

home in Montana. Just his cabinets were $142,000. Just his cabinets. That's just right

down the road from me. So, there's a business that hires people, that does big projects.

I do want to explain that discovery is very much like a funnel. When you start out, you're

wide open. You're open to ideas and really quickly you're funneling. Again, you're not

trying to find the dream job. You're trying to find a job that makes sense. And that's got a

future. Maybe not that job has a future, but it's going to lead to a future. That's not always

possible to predict, by the way, either.

There's some other things that we can get you to facilitate or [indiscernible 00:41:03] and

some other stuff.

I thought I'd tell you a couple stories about discovery. A lot of times people are looking for

the ah-ha moment, because there are ah-ha moments, or what Mike Callahan sometimes

calls a remarkable moment. And they happen once in a while. But they don't always

happen. But I thought I'd show you a few of them.

We were starting to train staff at Easter Seals in Orange County, and it was a guy that we

work with who has a psychiatric disability and he's got a physical disability and he lives in

a boarding house. And he didn’t want me to come to his house. He wanted to meet at

Starbucks because he really likes Starbucks and he figured I'd probably buy him a cup of

coffee, which would be a good thing. He's living pretty poor off an SSDI check.

And so, we met at Starbucks and I got two staff with me because -- usually I'd have

maybe one staff with me, but I'm training them, so I got a couple folks with me. And so,

we're sitting there with Daniel and nothing. I am getting nothing from this interview. I

mean, you know, tell me about yourself, Daniel. Well, I don’t know. What do you want to

know? Well, tell me about growing up. Well, you know, I don’t really like -- I don’t like to

remember that.

So, okay. Tell me about what you do in your spare time. Well, I don’t do much. And it is

going nowhere, and the staff are looking at me like oh, my god. I can't believe we're

paying this guy. You know? And so, we sat there, sort of in silence, trying to figure out

okay, how do I do this without firing 40 questions at him? Trying to have a conversation.

We have hit on nothing. We don’t seem to have anything in common. I'm a country boy;

he's a inner-city boy. The whole thing.

And then he says do you drink wine? I think that's what he said. And I said well, yeah. And

he says well, you know, I've always thought that I should own a winery. Okay. Now, that's

a job description. But we don’t want to discourage that. This is an opening.

Well, tell me about that. And so, he says well, I'm growing a grape vine on my deck right

now. His deck is like this big. All right? It's like a grape vine. It's like great. Well, tell me

some more. He says well, I was thinking that I could maybe grow grapes and sell them for

a while and I could sell them to wineries and then I could save up and get a -- you know,

buy a winery somewhere. And I'm doing the math in my head. I'm thinking boy, that's a lot

of damn grapes. You know?

But you never say no to people. You know, we have a saying in our office that we're hard

on ideas and we're easy on people. If I say no at that point, if I say well boy, that would be

really hard to do, haven't I lost him at that point?

What I don’t want to -- like, I don’t want to lead him on either. I want to just say tell me

about that. At some point, we're not there yet, but at some point, we'll put some numbers

down on paper. This idea that people don’t argue with their own data. When he sees that

that's a $30 million whatever, and there's probably -- you know, if I jump to that conclusion

right away, I've probably missed an opportunity for him to grow specialty grapes or

something. If I take that for what it is and just blow that up and to say you know, we ought

to explore agriculture with him.

Right now, his one outlet is that his therapist gave him a grape thing, vine. Whatever. A

grape thing. Gave him a grape thing. And that he's growing it and that that tells me

something. It hasn't died yet. Got some skills there. Who am I to say he won't own a

winery? I can't predict that. He may well own a winery. I have to be open to that. I'm going

to accept that we don’t know enough yet that that's a theme, but at least we got

something.

So, then we sat in darkness for the next 15 minutes. And like nothing is coming. I mean,

that's it. We have -- and then finally, I said well, I got to go. I'll be back in a couple weeks. I

said you know, why don't we think about some places where we could go talk about -- you

know, go talk to some people in agriculture? Which is going to be tough in Orange

County. Everything's paved in Orange County.

[00:45:08] But believe it or not, we found a couple greenhouses. We found some places.

What we found was that people grow crops and stuff under the power lines. They've used

those easements, or they've bought those easements back or rented them from the power

company through the state somehow. State set aside to put up power lines and there's

actually a lot of agriculture going on in Orange County. So, who knew? But we started

looking and we found it.

But anyway, before we leave, just before we leave, he opens his cellphone, he says -- he

reaches in his pocket, he says I want to show you something. I'm like oh, god, he's going

for his gun. This guy has a history of violence, by the way. I forgot to mention that. He's

got a felony conviction and whatnot. And he opens his cellphone and he flips it over. He

says, want to see pictures of my gun collection? Now, he's not allowed to have guns. But

they're fake antique guns. And he's got several of them and he's taken his personal needs

money and gone out and bought guns at auctions and they're replicas. And he knows all

about them.

So, you've got this. He is really into it. He can tell you all about them. He can take them

apart and put them back together. You know, wow. This is like a theme, sort of. We don’t

know whether it's law enforcement, whether it's shooting people, whether it's hunting. We

don’t know anything, but firearms somewhere is in there. Law enforcement or whatever it

is.

So, with just a little conversation he says well, I'm really into shooting guns. He says but

I'm not allowed or haven't been allowed to own a real gun and I don’t think I want a real

gun anymore. And yeah. He didn't actually do anything bad in his life. He got in with some

bad people who did some bad things. And he was the least defensive. You know, he was

the person who could least defend himself is what it sounds like. He's a really great guy.

So, we went to the shooting range. We've been to the LA Police Academy, which is

nothing like the movie, by the way. They don’t have a sense of humor about that at all, it

turns out.

So, we've done some things. What he ended up doing, when we started looking at his

ideal conditions of employment, he takes sort of a psychotropic cocktail that reduces

some of the symptomology. He has a certain amount of ideation and auditory

hallucinations. And so, he takes some medications that take care of that for him. But they

keep him up most of the night and he sleeps most of the day because of it. Hence, the

Starbucks fix. To get anywhere during the day he needs about four gallons of Starbucks

to get going.

And so, he works on a night crew. He works on a watering team and they go out and they

water the plants and they groom the plants. In LA, a lot of the outdoor malls have these

sort of massive -- you guys have been to LA or at least you've seen it on TV. It's green

there and they have all these potted plants and whatnot. So, he works on this team. They

provide the transportation; he's getting to grow stuff. He hasn't put away the idea that he's

going to own a winery and we never had to say well, that's a bad idea. He's saving up.

That's his deal is he's saving up for that. That dream has not gone away for him.

But we got him working right away. Is it the greatest job in the world? No. No. And for

some of us -- I mean, remember, that would be like yardwork for me. I feel bad that I

helped him get that job. But man, he loves it and it fits who he is, and he works at night

and it's great. And he's with a team of people who support him.

So, again, you know, nothing too fantastic.

So, we're working with this guy named Charles, and I've never met Charles before, and

Charles lives right outside of Tijuana. Right on the border. And so, we go right on the

border and we go and meet Charles and Charles is in a day program. And we said

Charles, where would you like to go meet? And he didn’t want to meet at home. He lives

by himself.

And so, we said well, you know, we'll just start anywhere you want to start. And he said

well, there's this great little restaurant that I like, and I never get to go there. And Charles

has -- he has a couple different labels. Autism being one. And he also has a psychiatric

label because people are guessing, I think, at this point. And he has a mild physical

disability as well.

Anyway, he's been in this day program for like 15 years. And he has a volunteer job at a

thrift store, [mimics snoring]. And so -- by the way, there's no such thing as a volunteer

job. It's either a job, or it's volunteer. It's not both. Right? Jobs you get paid for.

[00:50:06] So, we go to this restaurant. Here's a clue. Don’t go to a noisy place to do

discovery because you can't hear a damn thing. Don't go to a coffee shop. Go somewhere

kind of neutral. Now, if the person absolutely, positively has to go to a coffee shop, right,

then go during downtime. But don’t go where you can't hear, where you can't have a

conversation.

When we go into this restaurant it is packed with people. And food's flying around and

people are having a great time and whatnot. And so, we have to wait about an hour. We

can't talk. So, once it calms down and I say Charles, well, tell me about yourself. And he

says about three words and that's it. It's the same thing as with Daniel. It's just nothing.

So, we're sitting there, we're finishing lunch, and I'm thinking well, okay. Time to go talk to

his sister, I guess. You know?

And then he says, what do you know about tumbler pigeons? I said I don’t know anything

about tumbler pigeons. I've never heard of them. And my wife has pigeons in her barn,

and she hates them. That's all I -- oh, no. Tumbler pigeons are different. I said well, what

do they do? He says stupid, they tumble. Okay. He says they're not roller pigeons, they're

tumbler pigeons. He says a lot of people get those confused.

I said well, how do you know so much about pigeons? Well, my dad, before he died, he

used to raise them. He taught me all about them. I used to take care of all his pigeons. I

said do you have any? He says yeah. I got 11 of them. I had 12. I don’t know where that

one is. I said well, what do you do with them? He says well, I feed them, and I train them,

and I take care of them and I keep them at my sister's house.

He's been served by this agency for 15 years. Nobody's ever been to his sister's house.

This is not an uncommon thing. We find this all the time. Nobody's been to his sister's

house. His primary support person. Now, he lives on his own, but his primary familial

support is his sister.

So, anyway. It took us about 10 minutes to figure out that it takes a fair amount of skills to,

like, keep tumbler pigeons from dying. That's a trick to be able to do that. There is a

National Tumbler Pigeon Association. They have an annual conference in Salt Lake City.

Google. Trust me. Go google it. We found people around there who do tumbler pigeons.

Now, this just happened, so I don’t know where we're going with this yet. But pigeons is

definitely a theme. If you know how to take care of pigeons, if you own pigeons, dammit,

I'm going with that.

We still need the other two themes. We're not ready to do job development yet, we don’t

think. We don’t know what he'd do with tumbler pigeons. But the fact is, is that there are

people around there who do take care of tumbler pigeons. And it doesn’t have to be with

tumbler pigeons being the theme. Would it be bigger than that? It might be birds; it might

be animals. We don’t know yet. But tumbler pigeons is somewhere in there. We can go

watch that fairly closely. That's the next assignment for the team is go watch him do what

he does with the tumbler pigeons. Watch him feed them, watch him train them. Go out

and talk, make some appointments with people to go talk to them about what they do with

tumbler pigeons.

The basic background question for me is, where do people who know about tumbler

pigeons, where do they work every day? Where are they? What are they doing for a

living? Some of them are probably working with pigeons. Some of them it's probably has

nothing to do with what they do for a living. But that doesn't matter either.

If I got somebody like Charles, likes pigeons, but let's say Charles is really good at

washing -- using a washer and dryer right now. And somebody else is over here and

they've got a business that uses a washer and dryer. But they both like tumbler pigeons.

Maybe I take those skills from somewhere else and put them in the environment where

people go yeah, he's great at a washer and dryer plus he likes what I like.

Don’t we tend to hang out with people who like what we like? It's the basis of

relationships. Hiring is personal. We hire people like us. We hire people -- that's why

people with disabilities don't get hired. Because the typical employer in the U.S. doesn’t

have a disability and they don’t have a relationship with somebody with a disability, so

they go those people are different. When we all age out and we're all using wheelchairs,

we'll start hiring people with disabilities. That's what will happen. So, we're all living long

enough that that's where we're going to go.

These are the -- this is the basic framework that when I'm doing discovery, this is what I'm

trying to find out. Now, you can't ask people these questions. You have to have the

conversation and you have to go to environments where you figure these things out. You

have to do activities that elicit skills and that also show you the answers to these. Not the

finite answers, but the clues to these. Remember, this is time limited. You're out there to

get the person working in something that makes sense for them.

[00:55:11] What I want to find out is when and where is this person in flow? Who's around

them when they're at their best? And again, a lot of times it's conversation that gives you

the clue. Mom will say boy, when Jennifer was in Yosemite, I've never -- when she was

camping, that was the best I've ever seen her. She was so helpful; she was so alive. That

tells me something. I don’t know what it tells me yet, but it gives me a clue.

If there's a particular person around that -- let's say you're working with somebody who

hits everybody or throws hammers at everybody, but there's always somebody that

doesn't get hit, that doesn't get their hair pulled, that doesn't get bit. Find out what that

person's doing differently. There's a support strategy in there somewhere.

When and where, again we talked about this earlier, when and where does this person

have their highest support needs? Is that an accommodation that we need to figure out?

Is that something that we need to avoid? Is that a training issue? Is it a communication

issue? Is it a behavioral issue? Just figure that out. And people will tell you, and through

observation, you'll see what doesn't work for them.

Another way to ask this is what's work for the person and what doesn't? And can we avoid

the things that don't work?

For Daniel, working during the day? Nonnegotiable. It is not going to happen, so don't

even try to get him a day job. You're just setting him up. Take him as he is. Don’t try to

change him. Take him as he is. Offer him support. The support that he needed was night

work. That was pretty simple.

Find out who knows this person best. What we find, unfortunately, is that people live lives

of isolation. If you're poor and if you have a disability, and those two go hand-in-hand, you

don’t know very many people. You don’t have much of a social network. And you don’t

have much opportunity to know people, which is the terrible thing. You have the

opportunity to develop those relationships beyond the acquaintance level.

A lot of the folks that we work with never have that opportunity. So, a lot of times what

you're doing is you're talking about the family connections. You're also, again, talking

about your organizational connections.

When we were working with Daniel trying to get into the LAPD, we got nowhere. When we

called the information number, it's like calling HR. It's like uh-uh. No, you're not coming

over here. No, you stay away.

So, we're in the day program. This is a great -- this is one of my favorite stories. We're in

the day program and I got the team, and I'm saying okay, who has a connection to the

LAPD? Oh, nobody. We don't -- I said somebody in your organization has a connection. I

mean, their board of directors is made up like -- you ever hear of Century 21 real estate?

The guy who owns Century 21 real estate is on their board. You ever hear of Tommy

Bahama? He's their major fundraiser. It's all these people, right? Oh, no. We have no

connection.

Just then, this woman who does the senior program, she walks through and she's got a

box of hats. And we stop her and what's the box of hats for? Well, I was showing these to

people in the seniors' program. You're paying for that, by the way. And they're all these

police hats. Police hats from all over the world. There's one from Prussia and there's one

from Saigon and there's one from here and one from there. Where'd you get those hats?

Well, when my father retired as a colonel from the LAPD -- but there's no -- the connection

was 30 feet away in the next room.

And that's what we find all the time that we underutilize the social capital that we've got.

Find out. Families hire one another, but they don’t know -- families are scared to hire their

kids. We get that a lot. You mean, I was supposed to hire my kid? I thought I was

supposed -- I thought it was hands off. Oh, no. This would be a good thing.

So, we want to know who knows this person best, not only because they can tell us about

them, but because there might be an economic development piece here.

Things that engage the person. Not just things that oh, yeah, I like to watch CSI at night,

but something that gets them up out of their chair and moving a little bit. Things that get

them out of bed in the morning.

Things that they do well. Don’t overlook those.

Philip, who I'll show you in a second, Philip has an autism label and one of the things that

he does in the morning, sort of his -- one of his rituals, is that he gets up in the morning

and he lives -- he used to live with -- his brother used to be in the house but his brother

got married and moved a couple blocks away. And he lives with his mom and his dad.

And Philip's a pretty young guy. And Philip also has epilepsy, so he's always wearing a

helmet, because he has, like, really serious seizures.

[01:00:19] But Philip gets up in the morning and he goes through all the beds in the house

and he tears off all the sheets and the pillowcases and throws everything in the washer

and dryer and he stands there until the wash is done. And he doesn't make the bed, but

he just does the laundry. And it drives his mom nuts because she's going through bedding

like crazy and it's expensive. And then she has to make the beds every day, because he

ain't making them.

But you think about those skills, there's something there. Doing wash is an important skill.

Where else do we do that?

Well, when we go to the helicopter factory what we -- or the helicopter plant, what we see

are these mechanics who are making $150 -- or they're billing $250 an hour for their

service. So, they're probably getting $100 an hour. It's a very highly skilled job. They're

over there at the parts washer washing parts.

Now, he also does the dishes, he runs the washer and dryer. He knows stuff about

cleaning. He loves cleaning. I don’t wish that on anybody because I hate doing that stuff.

But if these are his skills and this is where you get in, then boy, walking around that

helicopter place knowing he likes helicopters, washing parts, we're billing $250 an hour for

somebody washing parts? I'm thinking this is a good job. At that point, that's not menial

labor anymore. So, couldn’t we work out that we pay him $25 an hour or $50 an hour to

do that? That's not where he ended up, by the way, but we'll get there.

So, tasks that they do well. What other environments does that happen in? Where are

those skills transferable? How they learn those tasks.

What we find a lot -- like Philip's really good in the garden. They have always had a family

garden and a flower garden and vegetables and whatnot. Modeling is a very ineffective

way to teach people, right? But he's been around his parents growing that garden for 20

years, so he's learned the in-and-outs of that garden. That's kind of important to know that

he knows the difference between a weed and a plant. Something I don’t know. Those are

pretty important tasks, right?

And then, the places where we can go and observe these things in other environments.

And that's always the tricky part is where do I do that? How do I get a handle on that?

Knowing your community is pretty darned important.

So, this is Philip. And this guy in the flight suit is the lead flight instructor. And these two

people here, this is Lisa and Christian and they are staff that I'm training. And so, we're

just stating to work with Philip. And Philip's themes, after meeting with him and his family,

are aviation. He and his dad almost every night go down to the local municipal airport and

watch the planes come in. And the municipal airport.

This helicopter plant, factory, rehab place, is on the grounds of the airport and there's

about six other little aviation businesses there. There's one that does flight seeing kinds of

stuff. There's another helicopter company there that's run by a -- they basically service oil

companies. And there's a couple other aviation related businesses there in this little

industrial park attached to the airport. He knows about airplanes; he can tell you about

what kind of model it is sort of. His language is very, very slow, but it's very deliberate and

if you give him time, he can tell you what he knows, and he knows a bunch of stuff.

Really into fishing. Okay. Now, is fishing a theme? Well, we don’t know at this point, but

when we go fishing with him, when we talk to his dad, we find out that he knows how to

fish. That he knows how to tie an improved clinch knot. Do you guys know how to tie an

improved clinch knot? He does. His dad has taught him, over 20 years, dammit, I got a kid

and he's going fishing with me. And he was going to teach him, and he taught him year in

and year out until he got it right. And dad tells this wonderful story about how he was

teaching him with a rope. His fingers didn’t work that well, so I taught him with a rope and

after 10 years he got it.

Imagine that. He stuck with that training for 10 years. This is pretty cool. I'd've been all

over that. It's like we are buying those hooks. But he's taught him out to cut bait, he's

taught him how to cut up squid and how to bait a hook so that the bait doesn't come off.

He's taught him all that. He's taught him what kind of fish they're fishing for. And they have

a little runabout and they go out in the bay and they go fishing and they do that whenever

they can. You know, couple times a month anyway. And his brother, his older brother,

goes with them as well.

[01:05:10] And he loves every bit of it. Does he love the fishing, or does he love his dad?

We don’t know. We don't care. We're seeing the skills. We'll go with that.

And Philip loves to talk about fishing. I live in Montana, so I can fish. So, we had a lot in

common there.

And then he -- also, that whole laundry thing, although I hesitate to call that a theme, I

think that's just who he is. And the other thing that he's really good at is the gardening

piece. And he'll stand out there forever, and he shouldn’t because the sun really affects

his seizure activity. So, that's been a tough one. They have tarps now over parts of the

garden where that will work for those particular plants and he'll go out there and spend

hours out there. He just loves it in the garden. And again, he knows how to water things.

Like he doesn't overwater. He's figured that out, but it's been 10, 15, 20 years of doing

that.

With the aviation thing, I send Lisa out and I said go find some aviation companies and

let's get an informational interview for when I come into town and I'll show you how to do

these.

And so, an informational interview is not a tour. An informational interview to work you

have to have seat time, because if you don’t get seat time, what you get is you get the

Chamber of Commerce tour and you're in and you're out and thank you very much. What

you want to do -- what we do is that we call and we say listen, I'm a career counselor. I'm

a career developer or something like that. I never tell people I'm a job developer because

they've heard from job developers. Job developers have been everywhere. That sounds

like a program.

I'm a career counselor and I'm helping somebody with their career. Here's the deal. We're

talking to people who have successful careers in an area that he's interested in. We'd like

to come and get your advice. And that's key. Your advice about next steps in his career.

How would you be building this career plan? So, we'd like to come meet you, tell us where

we are right now and get some pointers from you. People love to give you advice. And

that's sort of the trick.

Right now, my anecdotal data, I'm getting into 85% of the places that I call. 85%. And we

probably do informational interviews -- I probably do at least one a week these days.

Sometimes two every other week or something. It depends on my road schedule. But it's

not hard to get into.

We just did a training in Montana where we brought in people from 20 different states and

we were teaching them about informational interviews, and I called a dozen businesses

and I got on 11 of them. So, not bad. And pretty cool businesses like TV production

businesses and stuff like that. Powder coating businesses. We don’t go to the box stores.

We don’t do restaurants. We don’t do fast food. These are all artisan businesses and

they're all small businesses.

So, these people are busy. These people don’t have a lot of slack time. There's not a PR

person in there. These people are producing all day long and they still talk to us.

So, we go in and we sit down and what's happened is that Lisa has called the owner of

the company, and that's really smart. Where do you start? Start at the top. What the hell,

right? Find out what their name is. The 10th richest man in America lives in Missoula,

Montana.

And so, I'm trying to get this guy that we're working as VR referral. He's got a master's

degree in accounting. I'm trying to get him in the accounting department. This is

Washington Industries. You've never heard of it. You ever hear of the Burlington Northern

Railroad? Ever heard of General Electric? He owns massive parts of those companies.

He's a rich guy. And 10th richest man in America. Oprah flies in to see him. So, there you

go. You know he's good, right?

I can't get within 10 miles of his damned office. Won't let me in. His first name is Dennis.

So, I call up the secretary and I go hey, is Denny in? She goes how do you know Denny?

I'm like oh, crap. Click. You know, I don’t want to lie. So, we got him the job eventually, by

the way. But anyway.

I don’t know where I was going with that. Oh, start at the top. Start at the top.

So, anyway. So, Lisa calls the owner of the company, finds out, gets this informational

interview, and of course, the day we go there he's not there. He's assigned the flight

instructor. Lead flight instructor, because they teach pilots how to fly helicopters. This guy

has never met anybody with autism before in his life, and he's like -- and certainly has not

seen anybody in a helmet other than another pilot. He's like okay, well, the boss kind of

told me somebody was coming over. Philip's like this and it's getting worse. And it's like

oh, crap. And he's like what's he doing? It's like it's cool. It's cool.

[01:10:00] You make a decision at some point. There are times when I don’t take the

person with me on the initial visit. I will say that, that there are some people who will

overwhelm the employer. It's rare, but it happens. So, just be cool with that. I err on the

side of bringing the person with me whenever possible because that's why we're there.

So, anyway. So, we sat down, and I said here's what we're here for. And he thought well -

- you know, we obviously are looking for a job for Phil. I said you know, we're not looking

for a job. And we're not. This is not bait-and-switch. I said what we're doing is we're

working on a career plan and the reason why all of us here is this is a training thing.

And I sort of explained where I was from and whatnot. He said so, like, why do you live in

Montana? And I said so I can fish. And he goes god, I'd love to go to Montana fishing. And

Philip goes fishing? I love to go fishing. Now we're all talking about fishing. This is how

this works. For a whole five minutes and then we're out of things to say.

But it breaks the ice. And so, I said you know -- I explained the process. I said we're

talking to several people because Philip's really interested in aviation. We're not sure what

to do with that, so we're talking to several people about their careers in aviation. So, can

you just tell us a little bit about how you got started in aviation? And he says well, I was

fishing. Philip goes fishing? So, I thought oh, crap. We're going backwards.

He says I was out in the Gulf of Mexico and I was fishing with a buddy of mine. I go down

every year and I was 40 years old; I'd just turned 40 years old, and I was out there, and

these helicopters were flying over to service the oil rigs. And he says I've been a computer

programmer for 20 years. I've hated every minute of it. When I go home, I'm quitting my

job and I'm going to learn how to fly one of those. And he says the only problem is I'm

scared of heights.

So, the lead flight instructor is scared of heights. Isn't that great? He said I went, and I

tried it. I took a lesson. And when I found when I was in control of the helicopter I was no

longer scared of heights. He said whenever I'd flown on airplanes, there wasn't enough

Ambien to get me on an airplane. But he loves flying.

So, anyway, he's been a flight instructor. He's the lead flight instructor. And we started

talking about that and we spent about an hour talking to him about their business, how

their business operates, what the competition's doing, where do their customers come

from, how often a helicopter needs to be rebuilt, what they charge for that. All that kind of

stuff. And we get all this information and then we said this has been really helpful. Do you

have a -- is there a little time to show us around? Because we want to see what are

people actually doing, because that's where we match Philip's skills to the job that's going

on in there. Doesn't mean I'm going to do job development in this place; it just means I'm

getting an idea for this, about this industry and how it might operate.

There's a sign on the other side of those doors. What's that sign say? Employees only. No

customers beyond this point. Why does it say that? Liability. Which is bullshit. Right?

You're telling me if I've got a $20 million helicopter and you're rebuilding it, I can't come

out and look at what you're doing in my $20 million helicopter? Do you think that's real?

Do you think you're going to keep a customer out? No. That's there to keep job

developers out. There's no liability. Liability covers everything. Oh, yeah.

You know, there's some opening for -- but if they like -- so, I say is it all right to go in here?

And he goes you're with me. We go right through that door. Those signs, those signs, job

developers do not be deterred by those signs. They let anybody they want in there, in

there.

So, we go in and we watch. We learn about French helicopters and we learn about Bell

helicopters and we learn about good helicopters and bad helicopters and how you fly

them and the different rotor configuration. We learn all this technical stuff.

And over here -- now remember, he loves washers and dryers. I mean, he seems to love

the mechanical side of them, and he loves doing washer and dryer. Over here in the

corner, industrial washer and dryer. Because everybody's wearing coveralls in there and

they get dirty all day long and they have to clean them.

Guess what? My guess is that in those six other businesses, everybody else is wearing

coveralls, too, and that they've all got washers and dryers.

And there's a really great little business idea. Why wouldn’t I just go around to the five

other businesses, buy these off of this guy and just say -- or just say hey, how about I use

this, I'll do your laundry. I'll bring in the laundry from the other places, I'll be around other

guys who dig helicopters the way I dig helicopters, and we'll all be happy. A business

within a business. Lots of ongoing support. We do that a lot with businesses. Especially

with people with high support needs. Surround them with people who are already running

a similar business. The customers are already there.

[01:15:00] But it's way too early to be thinking this way. We're not there yet. I'm already

thinking in job descriptions. Can't think that way. It's when I see the parts thing, and here

are these guys over there washing parts. Have any of you ever used a parts washer?

They're really simple. They're filled with solvent, you get a brush, it's got a little

recirculating pump, and it's got a door that comes down if the thing catches on fire. So,

you try not to smoke cigarettes and run solvent at the same time.

Parts washers, a really good parts washer, boy, it costs you a thousand bucks for the one

with the big -- you can buy one off of eBay for 50 bucks today, probably. How far is that

from doing the dishes and washing clothes? So, we see those things. We see okay -- and

here's six mechanics working, all intersecting tasks. Things are heavy in there. It needs

two people to carry this over there. Why would you use two mechanics when you could

use Philip?

So, there's all kinds of development things there. This is not what Philip ended up doing,

by the way. We never did any job development there or whatever.

Another place, remember the fish? We blew that up into bigger than fishing, but fish

related, because he seems to have this thing about fish. And we got to looking at koi

ponds. Went out and did an informational interview with a guy who builds koi ponds.

This is why we do the list of 20, because when they got down to about 15, they'd run out

of ideas and somebody said well, I got a koi pond at home. Would that work? That would

be number 16. That would work.

Go out, interview this guy, and the guy says boy, I love doing the koi ponds. He says we

design them; we install them and whatnot. We take care of the fish. He says but man, we

haven't got room to grow the plants and I buy the plants and half of them come in and

they're dead. And boy, if somebody would only make plants. Well, what's he love? He

loves fish and he loves gardening. His parents are scared to death that he's going to have

a seizure and kill himself.

During the middle of this he was doing transportation training and he fell headfirst off a

city bus and was in the hospital for six weeks, which is at the point that you stop

discovering. The clock stops at that point. He's okay today.

His business is set up and it's just getting going now. It's set up in -- to start it's like four

cattle tanks. Four watering troughs basically with aerators in them. It was about $1,000 to

set this up. Got an awning over it so he can work out in the sun and basically, he grows

plants.

And this guy that we did the initial interview said I will buy everything that you can sell me.

And as we grow it, as he gets more used to doing this -- he's lived a fairly sedentary life,

so he's getting used to working. But it's all set up. He's got family support. There's no

need for a job coach other than to help get the initial business off the ground.

But we went from helicopters to koi ponds to growing the plants for koi ponds and a

market. And we wrote the business plan. And so, $1,000 later, here we are. There it is.

One more. Because every once in a while, things happen during discovery and you say

we're done. That is a pitiful thing to do to a horse. That is not a caribou. That is a

miniature horse dressed up for the Christmas pageant.

And so, this young man David lives outside of San Diego. And you [indiscernible

01:18:31] -- you know, you can always tell where I've been because my stories -- usually

they're either about Atlanta or they're about California these days. This is where I'm

practically living these days.

But David, really interested in horses and ranching. And in his bedroom, he's got 300

DVDs of Western movies. Got 10 copies of the same one in some cases. Just has to

spend down. Has to spend down his SSI check. Doesn't want Star Wars, doesn't want any

of that crap. I want a Western.

So, one of the places, one of his emerging themes, we haven't got themes -- he loves

trucks. I'm not sure that that's a theme at this point. But boy, cowboys, Western stuff,

that's a theme. That is so strong in who he is. And so, he's never worked on a ranch,

never been on a ranch. Whatever.

So, Natasha is -- the woman who works with Natasha and I've said now, when we do

stuff, we're not doing job development. This is the beginning of discovery. So, we say well,

let's identify some ranches. We're not even sure this is a theme yet. Let's go visit a couple

ranches nearby. There's a couple in the area. Let's go to some riding stables. Let's do

some casual interviews to see is he even interested in the environment? What's he do

when we go out there? Maybe get a couple hours of cleaning out a stall, because that's

where cowboys start. And we're grooming a horse or something. Anything to start.

[01:19:57] So, this is her first visit. I'm home. I'm in Montana. I'm in my office. She goes

out, takes David, meets with the owner of this place. This is a huge riding stable. She's

got like 13 staff, something like that. All these cowboys. And she manages this -- what do

they call it when they breed horses? Breeding horses. Stud. She has a stud service there.

And then they do -- like over here in the background, that's one of the paddocks where

they teach dressage. And then they've got barrel racing and they've got Western riding

and they've got hunter jumper and they've got all these different kinds of horse things that

they teach. And they board horses there, they own horses, they breed horses. It's a big

operation.

The other thing that she's got is she's got a children's program. And the children's

program has these miniature horses. Well, Natasha's having this discussion with this

woman who owns -- just been hard to get a hold of, nailed her down. She said come out,

I'll give you a half an hour, and we can talk. So, Natasha's talking. David's standing there.

David's acting like he could care less. He is totally checked out. He's yawning. He's

burping. He's, like, looking around. Natasha is mortified. It's like oh, my god. She was just

saying, how do I get out of this? This is such a bad idea.

And so, Natasha, trying to take sort of the heat off of David, sort of blocks him and starts

talking head on to this woman. This is how she describes it to me. And that she is just

excited and saying oh, tell me about that over there and tell me about -- what do you do

on weekends? And tell me about your children's program and all this.

Well, David wanders off, because there's another -- like over in this area. And there's a

paddock, this little paddock, and it's got a dozen of these miniature horses in it. And he's

over there and he's climbed over the fence and is in the middle of these horses and he's

in there petting them and talking to them. And the woman sees this, and Natasha sees

this and she's like oh that is -- she goes my cowboys hate those horses. They call them

pygmy horses. They're not real horses. Do you think he'd want to work here?

Natasha says oh, no. We're not allowed to take the job. We're doing discovery. So, the

vice president of Easter Seals calls me and says, what the hell are you teaching my staff?

They got a job offer today and you told them not to take it. And I'm no, no, no. Call them

back. Take that job. So, he's been there for almost two years now. This was the first -- so,

we didn’t need discovery basically.

He didn’t have money for a good cowboy hat. You got to have a cowboy hat there. So, the

cowboys got together and bought him this $100 Resistol hat. And he does what other

cowboys do. He's learning about horse training; he knows how to groom horses. They've

taught him all that stuff. No job coach. He didn’t want a job coach. That was the

negotiation. He swaps out stalls. Really nasty work. But he works full time out there.

Really great gig. Couple years out there now. This Christmas will be a couple years.

So, anyway. I'm probably out of time. So, thank you very much.