Episode 123: A neurodiverse workplace in the LEGO world — with David Kokai and Lili Juhász from WE LOVE WHAT YOU BUILD (WLWYB)

If your employees spent their workdays engrossed in colorful LEGO® bricks, what would you think?

If you’re David Kokai, you’d probably think that business is good!

David founded a company devoted to the LEGO® secondary market when he left the corporate world to start WE LOVE WHAT YOU BUILD (WLWYB), a LEGO® parts dealer. WLWYB operates their breakthrough platform, MOCHUB, which allows LEGO® builders to share their work and make money with their creations.

WLWYB is a neurodiverse workplace that employs autistic people in key parts of their business, and recognizes that the diversity within their teams makes their company stronger.

During this episode, David and Lili talk about:

• How David’s interest in data science inspired him to start a LEGO®-focused business
• Why they decided to create a neurodiverse and autism-friendly work environment at their company
• How they recruit and employ autistic people in key parts of their business and build a work environment that is safe, effective and a great place to grow for all of their employees
• How they adjusted their business operations during the pandemic lockdown with almost no interruptions in orders
• Advice for people who want to start their dream company

To find out more about WE LOVE WHAT YOU BUILD, visit their official website wlwyb.com and connect with them on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. You can also contact David and Lili through the contact us page on the WLWYB website.

Subscribe to the FREE Beyond 6 Seconds newsletter for all the latest news and updates about my podcast!

The episode transcript is below.

Carolyn: On today’s episode, I am speaking with two executives from We Love What You Build, a Lego part dealer company on the secondary market of Lego based in Hungary. David Kokai is the founder of, We Love What You Build and Lili Juhász is the HR manager. We Love What You Build operates their breakthrough platform, mochhub, which allows Lego creators to share their work and make money with their creations. David and Lili, welcome to the podcast.

David: Hello. Carolyn thank you so much for having us.

Carolyn: So happy to have you here today. So, David, tell me what inspired you to start a business focused on Lego?

David: It’s a long story. It started more than a decade ago. I am, I was studying business administration and economics. So I’m an economist by trade and I used to work in a big multinational company in the IT sector. I used to say that was my suit and tie time.

And I was having a strong feeling that, in order to, to have a real satisfaction in life, I have to do something else. It was a nice career, but many, many aspects were missing from that life. So I started to devote more time to my hobbies and back then, one of my important hobby was learning data science and while learning data science, I just realized that there is a very interesting underworld market of the Lego parts. Underworld the is, for short, don’t, don’t take it literally, but there is a, big universe that people are trading, buying and selling Lego parts for the according their needs, which is, which, which was not even known by me, but, which is quite a, which, which was back then quite an interesting thing. And there was a platform. There is still a platform where you can trade these Lego parts.

It’s called bricklink.com. It was acquired by the Lego company last year. So it’s a legit marketplace. And I just realized that all the data available on this platform can be processed and analyzed just like any other commodities. And, I found the sweet spot to exercise with my data science ambitions. And from that seriously taken hobby, after a couple of years, I just realized that there is a real business potential in it. And, we can generate value to our customers and to the whole AFOL community. AFOL stands for adult fan of Legos. It’s also a pretty well known abbreviation in the Lego world but not for others.

So, so I just realized that there is some, some kind of value to be added to this community while it’s a, you can guess it’s a very inspiring atmosphere to work among a couple of millions of, of Lego bricks. So from, from that two aspects, it just evolved. organically, which is quite a healthy, attitude, I believe.

And I devoted more and more time, more and more focus to the hobby project, then it became my, my primary activity. And, and I just realized after a couple of years that we had a team of more than 10. 10 people and, and it grew to a size, which, which I can be proud of and which, assures that, that, further developments are also also, potential feasible.

So that’s the, the, the story in short. And, if I may introduce Lili. Lili Is not only the HR manager, but also the first officer on board in this company. She’s a, the one who spends the most time with the company right now. She was one of the first, new acquisitions when, when, I started to scale scale up this business.

And she’s the one who, who did all the, all the critical. fields during the development. And right now, HR is one of the most important, I would say critical from the, from the aspect, how important it is for the business. One of the most important fields, which is, which is HR and it is as important because, we are not only dealing in a very inspiring and very, very interesting and innovative market segment. Lego parts, but, we have also introduced the, some kind of business innovations, at least here in central Eastern Europe towards setting up an eye in a neurodiverse working environment. And, the development of this neurodiverse working environment was one of the most biggest challenges that was ahead of us. And, she was the, the head of this development. And right now she’s the one who, who is operating all the procedures and all the to-dos concerning this kind of, of, of working environment. Yeah.

Carolyn: And that’s a very unique part of your business, I understand is that you employ a neurodiverse workforce.

So Lili, I’d love to learn more about it, what it means and why that’s so critical to your business.

Lili: Well, actually it all started like a few years ago when we started to think about, how we can scale up for our human resources and, And for us to employ autistic people, was, like it was like a business decision, because the thing is that we wanted to find people who are as much as, who was, who loved their work as much as we do so who can really enjoy it, who can really love it because it’s really, I don’t know, an unbelievable quantity of Lego parts, all our procedures, our, our Lego parts.

It’s very visual, counting all the parts and working with Lego parts on a daily basis. It can be very monotone monotonous monotonistic, I’m sorry. So, so when we were thinking about workforces and, and human resources, we came across with this idea that what if we widen our pool and, and see what we can do there.

And we started to work very strictly on this. So we had specialists who came to our workplace and they looked around, they looked at our procedures, whether it fits, autism friendly or not. And, and the thing is that every specialist who came into our office said that, okay, this is the perfect place for autistic persons to work, because our, all our processes are very defined. We have only objective decision points in our processes. So you don’t have to like, start to think about what to do next because there’s very definite solutions for each, decision point. And, after very careful consideration, we decided that, with the appropriate amount of work and, and caring, we can actually create a very safe work environment for autistic people, and we can actually employ them and widen and well, yeah, and scale our operations resource wise.

Carolyn: Wow. That’s …

David: And I may have add, sorry to interrupt you. If I may add, maybe the roots of the idea. And, I come up, the second time with that, what you have to consider, this, if you, if you try to evaluate our situation that we are in central Eastern Europe and, central Eastern Europe is a bit less progressive than, than other more progressive parts of, of the world. So diversity, in general, is still an open discussion in the society. And I’m standing I’m, I’m, I’m behind diversity of any kind. I think that, anything which is diverse is more strong than something with less diversity. And our atmosphere, the ambience in the office was always very open and we always were evangelists of, of diversity and then it came up that we, we have a field of development where we can show the world or show the show to our close environment that a diverse team of any kind is much stronger than a less diverse one. So that belongs to the story as well. However, it was a very, very, serious taken business decision, from the, from the very first second and still it is.

So we do not build a diverse team, a large pool, large for, for itself. We do it because we have very strict business interests towards that. And, and that’s why we, we landed at, at autism because all of our, as Lili says, all of our, activities or decisions are binary. There are no vague decisions.

You know, a Lego part is either one by three or one by four. But there is nothing, nothing on the borderline. And, and while it is monotonous and repetitive, it, it is a perfect fit for people living on a spectrum. And after we have realized that there was nothing else to do, just two years preparation to set up our infrastructure, set up our procedures, and set up the team’s mindset to, to get the first colleague on the spectrum and still then, but that, that, that’s Lili’s story. I’m, I’m, I’m really happy and really confident with what, what we have achieved.

Carolyn: That’s fantastic. It sounds like such a great fit. Yeah. Lili, I’d love to learn about, you know, the talent recruitment and management cycle, how you recruit people and how you support them in the workplace.

Lili: Well, it’s always an ongoing challenge because with every new position comes new challenges. Well, basically we, we try to find people at every channel we can, we started to get in touch with the universities. I mean, autism wise universities, Yeah, foundations. And, we are recruiting online as well.

So we are trying to find people on online ways as well. And the thing is that, from the very beginning, we wanted to make this as very clear as possible. So when you, when you are hiring or interviewing autistic people, then you have to make sure that you are very direct. You ask the questions very direct.

They know what they, what they, they know what they can expect. Yeah. they understand what are the requirements. And so at the very beginning, we started to make, these very small office meetings, meet-ups where like a few of them came here. We showed them around. We told them what we do, what they can expect of this type of work. And then we always did a little workshop with them asking them what makes a workplace autism friendly from their points of view. So we always want, we are always open to new ideas and to their ideas. So that’s actually what we can learn from the most and, from their questions and from their feedbacks. And based on this meetups, many of them could decide whether if it’s something they want to do, if it’s something where, or if this place is a place where they want to work, because we actually have an open workspace. So it’s always a challenge for them to like, decide whether they are comfortable with this or not.

And, and if they still decided to, to apply for the job, we interview them. And, and yeah, and after if an interview was successful, the whole onboarding process includes a sit down where we understand what are their specific needs. What, where should we focus on, on mentoring?

So we actually have a mentoring system for all our employees. And I think this is what makes this very unique because many, well in our country, many of the neurodiverse workplaces came from, from from like, life experience. So many neurodiverse workplace was made by someone who has an autistic son or daughter, or has a family member. But, it’s very unique to, to create a neurodiverse workplace on the open market, strictly as a business decision itself.

And this is, something which we, we stand for because we like to, what we want, what we are teaching to our team that, yes we are neurodiverse, but diversity is important. It makes you stronger. It’s, it teaches you to always keep an open mind and always be open to, to learn, how to communicate better to learn what makes other people different.

And, and I think that, this makes our team very strong and, and yeah, and they are actually amazing. I mean, each of them are really, really open minded. They are, they are doing, they are putting the work in and they, they are open to do this. So they’re not like, okay, I don’t know how to handle this, but, they are very proactive about it.

Carolyn: That’s wonderful. It sounds like it’s such a great fit with the type of talent that you need and what really needs to be done for the business. And that makes so much sense.

Lili: Yeah.

David: Absolutely.

Carolyn: So, you know, you had mentioned earlier that, you know, the business, there’s challenges around talent management, and certainly I’d imagine there were big challenges this year with the impact of the pandemic. And, but I understand that you weathered those as a company quite well, in terms of not having, almost any interruptions in orders or anything like that. So tell me about how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected your business this year.

David: That’s also Lili’s table because, besides being HR manager, she is the health and safety officer as well. So it belongs to her.

Lili: Yeah. well the thing is we are very lucky because, ever since this whole pandemic hit, people are staying at home and they’re playing with Lego all the time, presumably, based on our orders. But the thing is that, that it’s really well when, when we had a quarantine for like two, two and a half months, that was the first, really big change, which we had to handle somehow.

But we did it very strictly and we did it very fast and, and it worked. Like, I think it went amazingly well. Basically in a few days we, we changed to being everyone at home. We start with like, as of today, we are still having our daily meetings in the morning at the beginning of, the beginning of the work time with everyone, and everyone is keeping track of their tasks and their questions, or if there’s anything we need to discuss so we can discuss it at the beginning of the day.

David: I mean, we do this online.

Lili: Yeah. We do this online. Yeah, obviously. Yeah. Thank you. Sorry. It’s just, it’s the new normal, so it’s so obvious to me, like, yeah, we do the, we do this, online. And what was really important, what a surprise.

It was communication, to get all our workers communicating about how they can handle their days, what they can do, what are the challenges they are facing and, And I think we, we, we did it well. And, I think what, what is really challenging for all of us and for all of our employees is, when you are working from home, actually the responsibility of creating your workplace and your work time management at home, it’s yeah, it becomes your responsibility because you don’t have the office to go in. You don’t have the desk in the office where you sit down, you don’t have the spaces for meetings for like coffee breaks and, and et cetera. So, so I think what is really important to help everyone, to understand what it means to have this responsibility and what it can, what they can do about it. but with good communication it’s I think it’s all manageable. And, and what, actually, having a neurodiverse workplace taught us so far. Is that, you can always, you always have to, like, yeah, you always have to communicate as good as you can.

Carolyn: Yeah, absolutely. It’s it was such a big change for so many of us having to suddenly work from home and all of our routines were disrupted. So it sounds like you’ve managed through that with people helping them to build new routines at home, because that’s what I guess we all had to do in this, in this situation in 2020.

Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, I’m, I’m curious, you know, you have such a, a business that is so close to people’s hearts with Legos and has such a great fan base. You know, what kind of feedback do you usually receive from your customers? Whether it’s the builders, the Lego builders that you work with, or the people that they sell with and, and what kind of, any stories you would want to share there?

David: Carolyn, it’s amazing. That’s one of, one of the biggest advantage to working, in a, in an, in an industry filled with love. Honestly the Lego community is one of the most positive communities of the world. There are a lot of communities, there are even many positive communities, but, the Lego community is among the most open, most positive, most really filled with love and happiness, and acceptance.

So we’re in a good industry, first of all. Second, what we do try is, we do innovate in this market and we try to, to find those, those areas, which, do those challenges, those, white spots, which are not yet solved by technology or, or logistics or whatever, but can add to the life of the, of the Lego lovers.

And that’s why, because we are innovating, we are getting so many and so many positive and good vibes back that that’s something which is, which is alone worth to totally for to work for. So we are getting a lot of, lot of positive feedback. Normally I tell the story that when a customer from New Zealand, and we are in Europe, from New Zealand orders something from us, it’s not because he wanted to try the international logistics or the capabilities of the international logistics. It is because they are sitting there at the other part of the world, or the other end of world, and we are the ones who can serve their needs. And that’s, that’s such a strong and good feeling.

I can tell you it, it gives us a lot of energy for the everyday tasks, everyday tasks. So, so our customer portfolio is quite balanced. Approximately one third comes from the US, one third comes from Southeastern Asia and, and the Australia Pacific region,  and one third comes from, from Europe, Western Europe, mainly.

So we can, we can feel it on, on our skin, how small this world is and, how similar we all are, no matter whether you’re from Africa, Asia Pacific, Europe or America, you have the same needs. You have the, the same figures for joy and so on and so on. And Lego bricks in, in, in, in this whole ecosystem at the end of the day are the perfect medium for this.

A simple Lego brick is just an abstract requisite but you can build at anything from that. And, and, our brains from all around the world work the same way. We want to put together different colorful Lego bricks in order to show us, to show the world what we feel, what we, what we want to express and so on.

So that’s so cool. And that’s that, that’s like one of the, I think that one of the most important success that I can, I can be proud of is, is that, that, we are here in, in an environment that we can, we can provide this kind of joy and we will get back more from that, that provision. In, in short, don’t want to be too, too pathetic in that, in that case.

But, but, at the end of the day, I think that’s, that’s, one of the most important success factors of ours. And you can, you, you can bet each and every colleague is happy to work here. It’s a good place to, to have a job.

Carolyn: It sounds like it. Yeah, it sounds like, you know, David and Lili together, you’ve really built what a lot of people would consider really a dream company and maybe David, as you form, you know, having formerly worked in, in the corporate world probably, you know, this really is a dream and just wonderfully, You know, just the way that you manage talent, so innovatively and are able to manage the logistics and the challenges of international shipping and building this great community.

Right. So that’s really incredible.

David: Thank you.

Carolyn: Yeah. What, what, I’m curious, what kind of advice would you have for someone who, you know, maybe they have an idea. They have a dream company that they’d like to start someday, but they’re, they’re just having a hard time taking those first steps to get it started?

David: First steps are always hard. Yeah, you can’t do anything against this, but, after you have put your necessary first steps in, then, it is going to be, paying, paying itself off. This is, this is just, a law of nature, and you know, what is kind of stereotypical wisdom is, is so true that, that, as, as I strongly believe that this is the rule of nature, that if you put effort and work into a goal, and that goal is going to be, going to paying it off sooner or later than then the next step is you don’t need anything else.

Just patience. Patience, self-confidence. If you, if you want to build your dream company, then you’re going to be self-confident enough to, to, work hard and to, to get into what the battle is with, with, not so colorful rather gray everyday tasks, which belongs, so which belongs to that.

So even in a, in a dream workplace like ours, the everyday tasks are as gray and as, as repetitive. And, you know, they, they, they, they can be as, they are demotivating as, as in any other places. The big difference is that, at the end of the day, when, when you start to make the, you try to make a balance, then, you have some extra additional items to be put into the pro part of the scale.

So life won’t be easier if you are pursuing your dreams and, building a business, managing a project towards the success for whatever project it may be. It is not going to be easier, whatever you do. But the reward, you will have all the influence on, on, on the reward. What you get after, after you have invested all those necessary efforts, what you had to had to invest.

And, and that’s why, that’s why I’d recommend everyone to push through their personal dreams, because the reward is going to be much bigger. The job to be invested, work to be invested is always the same, a whole lot. And you know, that’s life. That’s why it is so, so this is nothing special. and no one’s going to be able to change this kind of rule of natures, the rules of nature.

Carolyn: Absolutely. Yeah. That’s great. Great advice for anyone listening, who may be thinking, or, or maybe having a hard time getting that first start. So wonderful. Well, David and Lili, thank you so much for being on my podcast. Is there anything else that you’d like our listeners to know, or, or maybe what’s really the best way for them to learn more about We Love What You Build, whether they’re a builder or they just want to learn more about your workforce? How can they get in touch?

David: We have a website which you can find on WLWYB. It’s an unpronounceable domain that is kind of consciousness behind it, because that’s when you have, you have first, you have to understand, and then, you have to memorize the, our name, which is, We Love What You Build. But once you, once you got to what this abbreviation stands for, then you’re gonna remember it.

Most of the people remember it. So everyone is more than welcome. We are under constant development on, on the website, but, please feel free to just say hello to us. Or, or if any of your viewers have any kinds of questions, have any kinds of specific curiosity, do not hesitate to contact us anytime because, both Lili, myself or any, any other member of my team I’m pretty sure is more than happy to, to give those answers and to, to widen this kind of community around us.

Carolyn: Wonderful. Well, thank you again, Lili and David for being on my podcast.

David: Carolyn, thank you, It’s been our pleasure.

Lili: Thank you.

Carolyn Kiel: Thanks for listening to Beyond 6 Seconds. Please help us spread the word about this podcast. Share it with a friend. Give us a shoutout on your social media or write a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast player. You can find all of our episodes on our website and sign up for our free newsletter at www.beyond6seconds.com. Until next time.