Randyland

This morning I found inspiration in a news story about a fifty-one-year-old waiter from Pittsburgh named Randy. Waiting tables at breakfast for twenty-three years, he has a love of Pittsburgh and of people. This attitude elicits comments. “He’s cheery. He’s welcoming. You feel like you are coming down to your kitchen to eat,” offered a customer.

“I’ve worked with him for twenty-three years. He never has a bad day,” said a waitress.

“He is eclectic, eccentric, and wonderful,” added a cook.

The restaurant‘s manager went further. “Ever-giving is his motto, and not just about breakfast, but about his love for other people.”

Randy has applied his positive attitude toward helping his community and laying the groundwork for opening his own restaurant. In the middle of northside Pittsburgh, he has created Randyland, a thirty-block area of renovated buildings and gardens. In the middle of broken-down buildings and boarded-up homes, Randy’s efforts have changed the look and the feel of the neighborhood.

He describes it as “an oasis of joy.”

Starting with $10,000 on a credit card, Randy bought the first building that he says was “trash, garbage, a ghetto.”

Over the past twenty-five years, Randy has used recycled materials and other people’s trash to create 800 streetscapes, gardens, flower pots, and murals. He’s even planted banana trees. In the process, he has beautified the area and changed attitudes. “Color is therapy,” he maintains.

A professional woman who knows Randy agrees. “The color helps us accept diversity and that we’re all different. We live in America. Randy sets the tone and gives you the opportunity to be your own self.”

Pointing to a bullet hole through his “Thank you” painted on a garbage can flap, Randy notes that he “thought of getting rid of the hole, but it’s interesting because it shows that we’re still in the city, still a-changing, but thank you for understanding us.”

Randy’s investors are his customers. Over the past twenty-five years, he has funded the entire project on the tips that he receives in his job. Randy hopes to turn the first building that he bought, now his home, into his restaurant someday, which will be a gathering place for the community.

The reporter asked, “What’s your goal?”

Randy answered, “Take Randyland worldwide. Teach people the joy to just live life and be happy in who you are. Don’t worry about the economy, your age, your sex, your wealth, your intelligence. You are so very, very, very, absolutely no doubt about it, valuable.”

This enthusiastic individual has many reminders for us as business people One is his attitude. People bubbling with enthusiasm are hard to resist. They make us smile. They are memorable. They make us want to be around them. Contrast this with someone who is negative. That person makes you want to get out of his or her presence quickly, right? Like bees to honey, enthusiasm attracts people.

This new year check your attitude and the attitude of your employees. Do your attitude and their attitudes attract people?

Set a goal in 2010 to exude enthusiasm.

(This is an excerpt from volume two of Profitable Marketing Monthly CD. Click here to find out more about the CD.)