BIF-2 Summit: Randy Antik
Randy Antik of Swat Team Partners is all about championing innovators. He wants to be six years old for the rest of his life.
“You only live in this history” -Frank Gehry
What it’s all about:
- Getting unstuck
- Aiming High: set the bar, raise it higher and higher still
- Focusing on your passions
- Figuring out your role
Randy’s role: be unstuck, leverage ideas, play to win. As a parent, he and his wife were told his son would never graduate high school. So they asked to have him tested, but the school couldn’t help him with his learning differences. They moved to a city with the resources to help him, tried private schools, tried boarding schools, and that got them closer. Eventually found a doctor (Dr. Mel Levine) who could help, and called him every day for three months until he had an opening.
This turned everything around. The aha was that they were very fortunate, but what about all the other kids? How do you scale Levine’s approach to reach all the kids? So Antik worked with Dr. Levine to explore the market, take initiatives (education, awareness, training, scaling), find money, and figure out what was in it for the stakeholders.. They’ve traind 28,000 teachers, reaching 4,000,000 kids a year, raised $70 million, and are involved with major city and state initiatives.
Many needs and opportunities out there like this. Antik realized he was a facilitator; he was unstuck, curious, and could offer strategic doing. This let him line up his passions and skills, and to realize his role: champion great minds and ideas.