Welcome to Why Not Me, embracing autism and mental health worldwide. Hosted by Tony Meehator. Broadcasting from the heart of Music City, USA, Nashville, Tennessee. Join us as our guests share their raw, powerful stories. Some will spark laughter, others will move you to tears. These real life journeys inspire, connect, and remind you that you're never alone. We're igniting a global movement to empower everyone to make a lasting difference by fostering deep awareness, unwavering acceptance, and profound understanding of autism and mental health. Soon in, be inspired and join us in transforming the world one story at a time. Hi, I'm Tony Meehator. Welcome to Why Not Me, embracing autism and mental health worldwide. Joining us today is Tara May, the CEO of Espiritek, a non-profit tech services company empowering autistic professionals through quality assurance, data services, and accessibility testing. With a workforce of over 90% on the autism spectrum, Espiritek has grown over 40% in new client revenue under her leadership. She champions neurodiversity, inclusion, and innovation, creating impactful opportunities for neurodivergent talent. As a parent of an autistic son, she will share her personal journey in what drew her to a spirit text mission of fostering inclusion and celebrating neurodivergent talent. She has a wealth of information and we're just so happy to have her join us today. So before we dive into our episode, we'll be back with an uninterrupted show right after a word from our sponsors. Discovering exceptional talent for your team can be a tough journey, but not with ZipRecruiter. ZipRecruiter finds amazing candidates for you, fast. And right now, you can try it for free at ZipRecruiter.com slash work. ZipRecruiter's smart technology swiftly pinpoints top tier talent for your roles with unmatched precision. The moment you post your job, ZipRecruiter's powerful matching technology instantly connects you with highly qualified candidates. ZipRecruiter lets you connect with those top candidates ASAP you can use Invite to apply to personally reach out to your favorite candidates. So ditch the other hiring sites and let ZipRecruiter find what you're looking for, the needle in the haystack. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. Try it for free at this exclusive web address, ZipRecruiter.com slash work. Again, that's ZipRecruiter.com slash work. ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire. Thanks for coming on. Absolutely, I'm excited. Yes, me too. So I guess my first question is, give us a little background on what it is you do. Absolutely. So my name is Tara May. I am CEO of an organization called the Spirit Tech. So we are a tech company. We do a variety of tech services ranging from QA to web development to cybersecurity. But it's all done by a team that is more than 90% autistic adults. So that's our mission, to embrace neurodiversity in work and in life. That's great. So my next question is, what are the humble beginnings of how it all came together? Yeah, the humble beginnings of a Spirit Tech date back 20 years at this point to 2008 when the founders, Brenda and Moshe Weitzberg, were helping their adult autistic son, Oran, look for work that was commensurate with his intelligence and not finding a lot of options. So from their kitchen table, fast forward 18 years to 2025, we now have 100 team members and roughly $6 million in annual revenue. And I took over as CEO about three years ago when they were retiring because they were coming into their 70s. So that seems like a fair age to retire. And then some. Absolutely. So what led you to the journey of working with this company? So my career was really steeped in digital transformation. So I would come into an organization, primarily legacy print media companies, and teach them how to be digital companies. And so the idea of tech productization is very near and dear to my heart user experience. And I also have an autistic son. I became really passionate about neurodiversity, leading a Spirit Tech, marries both my professional love and my personal love in a really special way. So your son's autistic. How old is he now? Yes, he's 14 now. He was five when he was diagnosed. So I'm about, you know, a decade into having neurodiversity be a very intimate part of my life. So how did it affect you? I've taught with so many people that have gone through the same steps that you have gone through. Everyone's story is a little different. So what's yours? So really, it's my son's story and I'm just along for the ride. He was preverbal until he was seven. So he only had a handful of words. And it took us probably three years to get his diagnosis, especially 10 years ago. Diagnosis is hard and it's complicated. And people have varying knowledge of autism in your journey along the way. So it took us a long time. His first diagnosis was global developmental delay, which essentially means, well, your child is not developing like everybody else, but we don't know exactly what's going on. And then we had a sensory processing diagnosis. We had speech delay diagnoses. And finally, we got to autism, which is truly who he is, right? To effects everything about how he experiences the world. And I had to completely relearn how to be a mother and how to be a parent because the way he learns and the way I was raising him had to be completely adapted. So I like to say we sort of both went through therapy together, right? Sometimes for many years, it was 40 hours a week. And what I learned through that process was that he is capable of absolutely anything he puts his mind to. He just might need different supports. And so when your mind opens to this idea of neurodiversity, you start to see it everywhere, right? You're like, oh, gosh, my grandfather, who didn't speak until he was seven, probably also was never going to be diagnosed autistic in the 1940s in Europe. But absolutely is, right? You see it in your friends, your family. And I thought at work and I was like, why do we not talk about the way that we learn and communicate and socialize in the workplace at all? It seems like a big missing gap to me. Yeah. So is he verbal now? He is not just verbal. He's verbose. And he's headed into three honors classes in high school. Wow. That's really nice. You mentioned that you learned along the way. What are some of the things that you look at completely different now than you did before? I would never even have the language for some of the things I understand now. So for example, he was incredibly visual. So even though he had a hard time getting the words out of his mouth, it doesn't mean he didn't understand what was going on around him. So as he was learning to talk, we pasted, my husband and I pasted our entire house with little cards that had the name for everything, refrigerator, bathroom, glass, fork. And this helped him connect in his mind what he was looking at with the word he needed to say out loud. I never even would have thought about that for any of my other children. I learned about something called proprioception, which is like your awareness of your body and how close or far you are from someone else. Well, he has terrible proprioception, so he would wander away from me, right? Wander away from mom to the extent that it was unsafe. And so we had to teach him how to cross the street, how to stay close to mom or stay close to a sibling to keep him alive, literally, sometimes. So you become really aware of the fact that your brain impacts everything about the way we experience this world. Yes, absolutely. So you mentioned other siblings. How many children do you have? I have four children. He has an older brother and sister, and he has a twin. Wow, that's awesome. Any artistic features with the other children? Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, it is sort of a journey and he has the highest support needs out of any of my children. But it turned out all three of them were neurodivergent in some way. Apparently, we don't make, you know, very typical brains around here. What about meltdowns? Do you have any issues there? Oh, oh, Tony. You know, I honestly, I feel like I've blacked out a lot of it. Because it's just a coping mechanism, right? You're like, I'm not going to think about that too much. He had a meltdown every day for two years, leaving for preschool. I had to hold him down and buckle him into the seatbelts on the bus. He had a meltdown every time he walked into a public bathroom that had the fan air blowing, which it took me forever to figure out that it was the sensory noise that was triggering him. He had such a terrible meltdown once that he unintentionally broke my nose from thrashing around. Again, that was just something where I had to learn what his needs were. I had to learn how life was going to look different with an autistic child than it was with a neurotypical child or neurodivergent in some other form. Sure. There was very few people I trusted to be able to take care of him. His grandparents were one of them, my mom and dad. They're just the most wonderful humans on earth. Even my dad had to learn, you know, when he says that he can't go into a restaurant, it's because he's going to have a meltdown and it's actually going to be painful for him. My dad quickly learned that no, that was not going to work. Pushing him to do it was not going to work and, you know, to let him sit quietly and take his food to go. So it became a learning process for absolutely everybody in our family, but it made us all better people, more empathetic people. Yeah. So with all this happening, how did the transition to the leadership role that you have now work? I often say, Tony, that I am in the most challenging and also the most rewarding job of my life. I get to show the world what autistic people and autistic brains are capable of. Also, I get to show my son beautiful representation of autistic people, not only thriving at work, but building and leading a company. 80% of our executive leadership team is autistic. And I didn't think about that when I took the position, but now I think it's one of the greatest gifts I've ever given him. With you being neurotypical, working with those that are neurodivergent, were there any issues that you had to deal with? So I think the biggest issue, and I'm very careful and conscientious about this, is that I am a non-autistic person, and so I can't speak for autistic people. Autistic people are perfectly capable of speaking for themselves, of having their own voices, and their lived experience is more powerful and important than my words ever could be. But I am CEO of the organization. So that puts me in a position like this right now to be talking about our mission and our work a lot. Right? CEOs are asked to speak a lot. I constantly try to make sure that I am incorporating what they share with me, and understanding that it is a deep trust and privilege that this team has given me to be a leader of this organization. I will share one more personal thing. Actually, as I was going through my first year of CEO, I was diagnosed with OCD. So I was finding this out about myself and figuring out how to cope with this. I think I was gifted the grace of this team in sort of learning about my own brain and how to be kind to myself. So what are some of the challenges you faced? Not so much with your son, because you've gone over the 10 years with that, and that's been a learning curve. What are some of the challenges you face at the workplace? Working with so many people that unfortunately the world perceives as a little different, even though they are fully capable of doing anything and sometimes better than those that would judge them. I have a very specific response for this question, because I get asked it a lot, and I've given it a lot of thought. In a lot of ways, working with the team at a Spirit Tech is absolutely no different than leading teams in my corporate workplace, because you're leading teams of individuals with strengths and weaknesses and human needs, and that's true everywhere you go. The one thing I think is harder at a Spirit Tech and more of a challenge is the self-esteem and confidence issues that many autistic people have. I think this comes from a lifetime of hearing about themselves from a deficit perspective, whether in therapy or in school or even well-meaning loved ones. It's all what you need to change, what you need to work on, and what's wrong with you. At a Spirit Tech, we're trying to reframe that and say, here's your value, here's what you have to offer the workplace and the world. The confidence issues are not easily undone. Yeah, that's so true. Have you ever had an instance where a couple of people, they may not see eye to eye on a couple of things, and then they say, well, your autistic you should understand, it's really not the fact that they're autistic, it's the fact that they're individuals and everyone has a different perspective in the way they look at things. Oh yeah, I mean, we've got 100 team members with wildly different personalities, right? Autistic people who are highly verbal, highly social, they want to process out loud. And then there are autistic people who are very, very introverted, want to process internally, need a lot of space. And so when you have two people with those wildly different preferences, and even beyond preferences, me, it's really, that can create conflicts, right? I often say autistic humans are humans. And so therefore, there is no stereotype that isn't broken in some way, shape, or form. There isn't a difference that we don't see among neurotypical people, that we don't see among autistic people. Yeah, absolutely. Now you say you have 100 people that work there, so that means you've got 100 different personalities. You have 100 different ways that they can perceive something or look at it. What can you tell the company that might be listening to this, or the CEO that might be listening to this, that they definitely need to hear, so they can do the same thing that you're doing, and not look at someone because they're autistic, and have a fear of hiring them? So there's a few things I would share. One is that, well, listen, Tony, let me say this first. I'm careful about positive stereotypes because they're still stereotypes, and they're still harmful. One of the universally true things about most autistic people is that they are incredibly productive and engaged in their work. So one Harvard Business Review study shows that if you pair an autistic person with a work project that matches their skill set, they're 150% more productive than their neurotypical peer, 150% more productive. Because the problem-solving area of their brain is bigger and more active in autistic people, they're 40% faster at problem-solving than neurotypical people. That's a pretty fascinating sort of cognitive application of how the autistic brain works. At the same time, they may have social deficits, and the interview process is built around social interaction, handshake, eye contact, selling yourself. When I talk to business leaders, what I want to urge of them is to look at a person's capability to do the job, rather than their ability to sell themselves. And I think that is incredibly powerful if you can do that. The second thing I say to business leaders is you already have a neurodiverse team. I mean, one in five of us is neurodivergent in some way, whether it's ADHD, OCD, autism. And so thinking about neurodiversity in the workplace, actively considering it, is going to be good for everyone on your team. It's going to improve employee engagement, loyalty, productivity, happiness, and innovation, and it is going to drive your organization's growth. So those are two things I love to share. Tell me if you've had this situation in your workplace. I had Temple Grandin on my podcast. She put it across as, don't tell me what to do. Give me a pilot's checklist. That way I can check off each thing I have to do, and it will get done. Have you found that type of situation to work in your workplace? Yeah, first of all, I love Temple Grandin. She is amazing. She's visited a Spirit Attack and advocated for a Spirit Attack. What an incredible human. But yes, absolutely. That is one of the workplace supports that we offer our team members is a checklist. Here is exactly step by step what I need you to do and how we're going to replicate it. But what I would say, Tony, is that while this is a more imperative need for many autistic people, it's also just a great workplace practice. Right? I mean, documentation is a great workplace practice. It's really about how important the workplace support is for autistic people. It's just more critical. Yeah, absolutely. When you finish a typical day, wait a minute. What does a typical day look like for you? Gosh. I mean, one of the things I say is true at a Spirit Attack or anybody else is that the higher up you get in your title and your organization, the larger of a percentage your day is just about problem solving. What problems can I solve for the company, for an individual, for my direct reports or my indirect reports or whatever it might be? So I do a lot of problem solving. Largely is that my day looks like the CEO's day of any tech company. Right? I'm looking at sales and marketing numbers. We've got a team. We've got growth numbers to hit. I'm looking at how operations are running. I'm looking at customer happiness levels. What I would say is different is that I also have a mission to advocate for. So I am often speaking and talking about this incredible mission we have to really embrace neurodiversity at work. So it's a typical CEO's day and then a little something special on top. Okay. That makes perfect sense. Now, when you finish your normal CEO's work day and you're walking out that door, you're not only accomplishing the business that is doing well, you're accomplishing helping the people that really need that kind of support because the average person just doesn't have that perspective. That's got to feel pretty darn good. Yeah. I would say, Tony, that I am the happiest I've ever been at work. And my husband would tell you the same thing. I chose to leave after 25 years of corporate jobs, a very wonderful high level C-suite position to pour my heart and talent into this amazing mission and this very unique organization. And there is not a single day that I don't believe that was the right decision. But I would also say, and my husband would agree with this also, I am the most stressed I've ever been because we are just chipping away at an iceberg. And the number of emails and inquiries I get from autistic people who would love to work for a spirit hat keeps me up at night. So I am constantly thinking, how do we grow so that we can continue to chip away? Yeah. That's great goals. Now, where are you located and what areas do you serve? So we are headquartered in Chicago, just outside of Chicago. Our offices are in Evanston. We have employees in 11 different states at this point. And we run our Spirit Tech Academy, which is career training in seven different states. So we're thinking about national expansion and hopefully someday international expansion. But right now we just hire here in the US and we work with companies from coast to coast. Do you do most of your work online? It's almost all remote at this point. All remote. Okay. Autistic people are really well known for the focus. Have you had any challenges with them getting focused on something, then going to something else that needs to get done, they focus on that? Really, they need to be focusing on what they started on. Any challenges there? Actually, the ability to work from home and work remotely has made those issues better for us. Autistic people often like to create their own sensory experience, right? Whatever they want that environment to look like. And they're able to do that when they're home is their work. When you are in an office, especially set up sort of open office environment, there's a lot more distractions. There's less ability to have maybe the quiet that you need or the background noise mitigation that you need. Also, about half of our team does not drive. So there were often long, expensive public transportation commutes. So the ability to work from home, I believe, is an incredible accommodation we can give to make neurodivergence work lives better. Absolutely. That sounds perfect. Now, are you set up as a for-profit business? We are actually a 501c3 non-profit. Okay, all right. Only because we have no ownership. Every penny that we make goes back toward our mission and supporting either our existing autistic team members or future autistic team members through our training academy. However, 95% of our revenue comes from clients just like it would in a typical for-profit business. Okay, all right. What would you like to tell our listeners that you think is just very important and not just about what you're trying to do, but more so on what you are doing? We are proving every single day the value that autistic people can bring to the workplace. Incredible intelligence, innovation, problem-solving, loyalty, productivity, and engagement comes from an autistic team. It is not expensive. We don't have to spend a lot of time or money creating the support systems that work for them. And you can do the same thing at your organization. And you'll benefit from it. Yeah, yeah. And it just has this great feeling that you're doing something, not only helping people, but doing something that can create jobs. And most important, you're doing something for a group of people that so often are not given the opportunities they deserve because of the perception that others have of them that just simply are not true. Absolutely. There's absolutely a stigma and stereotype. Sometimes our team uses the word infantilization. Like a lot of people think autistic adults are like children. And that's just not true. Autistic adults are mature, intelligent, and capable. I can tell you that from personal experience, the team members that I build a spirit tech with every day, they're not clients or people that I'm serving. They're my team members in building an incredible tech company. And they're my friends and my colleagues. And I feel very lucky to be building a company, not for them, but alongside them. Yeah, yeah. I actually try not to use that word stigma as much as I can. I use the word perception. Perfect. I'm going to steal that from you, Tony. So many people use the word stigma. And when you use that particular word, it has a connotation to it that is bad. Right. So I really dislike using that word. Yeah. Are there some autistic people out there that have meltdowns and do some bad things from time to time? Yeah, that happens. The media seems to focus on that. But I think we need to focus on the good and do away with all the negative connotations. Then use something like perception. Because perception is what they may think it is. But in reality, it's really not what it is. So that's the reason why I use the word perception as much as possible. Right. And we should all open our minds to perceive what is actually there. Right? I love that. Absolutely. Because you can have in your mind what you think it is. Then when you meet someone, you find they are autistic. You didn't realize it. That should change your perception. Absolutely. I don't look like what about Bob in terms of having OCD. The way it looks in me is incredible perfectionism, high performance, and these unrealistic standards I put on myself. Well, people at workplaces love that about me. So it's just everything is about what you're capable of, not what you're diagnosed with. Exactly. Exactly. Well, this has been great. Great information, great conversation. I really appreciate you taking the time to join us today. Thank you so much for having me and for your really thoughtful questions. Oh, it's been my pleasure. Thanks again. Thanks for taking time out of your busy schedule to listen to our show today. We hope you enjoyed it as much as we enjoyed bringing it to you. If you know someone who has a story to share, tell them to contact us at why not me dot world. One last thing, spread the word about why not me. Our conversations are inspiring guests. The show, you are not alone in this world. 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