DETROIT – If Andy Didorosi had asked anyone ten years go if he could start a successful bus company in Detroit, they might have told him no — but it’s more likely they would have told him he was crazy. He knew nothing about buses, and not a lot about business. He was only 24, had dropped out of college, and didn’t have much money. But he loved to tinker with things, bought an old school bus, mainly because “I wanted to make it easier for kids to get to school, and people to get where they needed to go.” Flash forward eight years, and the Detroit Bus Company had become wildly successful. It was making it possible for thousands of kids to get to school, kids let down by the city’s notoriously horrible transportation system. Thanks to a system called Ride for Ride, everybody that bought a ticket made it possible for someone less fortunate to get a free bus trip, to their doctor’s, say. In a city without much transportation and where more than a third of all adults lack access to a private automobile, that was huge. And the bus company was making money, too — renting buses out for special events, and running a variety of tours, including a pub crawl through Detroit’s oldest bars, called Drunks of Antiquity. So many people in other cities came to find out how he did it that he drew up a do-it-yourself bus company kit, started a company called Farebox and began marketing it on the Internet at Farebox.io. Then, however, the pandemic hit. Everything shut down – restaurants, bars, sports events. School went online. Didorosi had to figure out how to stay financially alive. “So we set up an assembly line and started making hand sanitizer,” he said. Naturally, he didn’t know anything about it, and naturally, he was soon making thousands, then tens of thousands of gallons of sanitizer to World Health Organization-approved specifications, for a city desperate to do whatever it could to ward off COVID-19. Soon, he had a new and successful business, the Arsenal of Clean. Being Andy Didorosi, he also sent a trailer load of the stuff to the Navaho nation, free of charge. While he did have to lay off most of his 38 employees, he managed to stay afloat.
Living in Detroit is not for the faint of heart. Last month, as the Bus Company was preparing to get back in business, someone hopped the fence during the night and stole the batteries from 10 of the buses, cutting off the cables and damaging wiring harnesses, doing approximately $5,000 or more damage to each bus. “I have to confess I was mad. I went down and bought an electric fence, and then realized, ‘no, I shouldn’t do that.” He shrugged, got to work fixing the buses, and installed security cameras and a guard instead. Andy actually lives in another part of Detroit, where not long ago, someone stole his front door. Recently, he woke to find someone else had gotten on to his back porch and was rummaging through his papers. He called the police, who took the intruder away. “He was higher than a kite,” Diderosi said, laughing. “He said, ‘none of this stuff better be in my name.” “The secret to living in the city, he said, is not much different than the secret to success in business, or anything else.” “Attitude and commitment,” he said. “That’s as important or more important than skills.” That, and perhaps one other thing: Andy seems to not only roll with the punches, but to take great pleasure at whatever life throws at him. The other night, a not-quite-healed broken knee still throbbing, he decided to clean his air conditioning condenser, and finished at 1 a.m. What his girlfriend Lisa and dog Zimba thought of this is not known, but the next morning, he paddled his kayak down a canal towards the Detroit River before starting his work day. He has more businesses he wants to start and other non-profit projects ahead, including sponsoring a Detroit Student Racing Team, and helping them convert a 1955 Buick into an electric race car. Being motivated may run in his blood; until he was eight, Andy lived with three other people in a single room in a house his great-grandfather built by hand long ago. His mother, a teenage parent, was a clerk at Kmart and put herself through college and law school. Today, she has a successful commercial litigation firm, and remains close to her entrepreneurial son, who now is considering starting a real estate business.
I don’t know what the future holds for Andy Didorosi. I do suspect Detroit would be better off if it had a few dozen more visionary self-starters like him. (Editor’s Note: A version of this column also appeared in the Toledo Blade.)
