EDITOR’S NOTE: Listen to both men tell their entire stories on my Politics and Prejudices podcast, available now on Apple Podcast and other platforms.
There’s sometimes danger in knowing too much. For example, I know all sorts of reasons why a young guy without a business degree could never possibly start a successful transportation company in Detroit. I also know that it might be even more nuts to think that a former roofer could start a successful coffee company in the era of Starbucks, Biggby, and a bunch of other major national and international competitors.
Yet both of them did it — maybe because they never even stopped to think they could possibly fail. They are both smart and hard-working guys, to be sure. They also have a lot of instinctive common sense. AJ O’Neil is a natural salesman and a showman. He could probably sell sand futures in Saudi Arabia. Andy Didorosi has the knack of looking at complex problems and seeing the need for common-sense solutions.
“I believe in the bus,” he told me last June. “The idea that self-driving care are going to take care of all our transportation needs is just ridiculous.” Well, of course he’s right.
Top automotive engineers have told me that while there may be some urban zones that will have self-driving vehicles, the idea that we will all be able to have a driverless car take us anywhere isn’t going to happen, not in our lifetime.
There’s a reason that Lyft and Uber have caught on; as Andy says, shared transit is not only more affordable, “it is the best way to meet people, decrease traffic congestion, and decrease out impact on the environment.”
Well, of course it is. I am convinced that if Andy had been in charge of marketing for the Regional Transit Authority three years ago, the voters would have passed the necessary legislation for an area-wide rapid bus system.
AJ O’Neil, on the other hand, knows coffee, knew Detroit suddenly had cachet again, and sensed instinctively that the time was right to bring the two concepts together. So he founded Detroit Bold, began cleverly marketing it as “awesome-style coffee for hard-working humans everywhere,” and wouldn’t take no for an answer.
Today, his coffee is in Kroger stores, Meijer’s and AJ is out there incessantly hustling it. You can find him almost every Saturday in Detroit’s Eastern Market, from where he sends a Facebook message to the entire city at the first gray light of dawn, saying simply, “Wake Up.”
By the way, I am a serious hard-core coffee addict, and I can’t get enough of Detroit Bold.
Both these guys are hiring people who didn’t have jobs and putting them to work. They aren’t going to revive the metropolitan area’s economy by themselves. But they are not waiting for someone else to do it either. Robert F. Kennedy once said that each time someone acts to improve the lot of others he sends out a “tiny ripple of hope,” ripples which can combine with other ripples from a million different centers of energy and daring.
Andy and AJ are doing their part. What about you?
This is Jack Lessenberry. I’ll see you next time.
-30-
