Randy Antik

CEO, Swat Team Partners

For years, Randy Antik has helped corporate executives turn their businesses around. Whatever's keeping you up at night, he says, SWAT Team Partners—the company that he and a team of other seasoned marketing pros founded in the 1990s—can help identify where your company is off-track and plot a course to reach your business goals.

The company's very name projects dynamism and action. The "strategic doers" at Swat Team Partners turn "key initiatives into growth solutions" and "provide the firepower to take your initiatives from idea to execution to accolades," the company says.

What's clear after spending some time with Antik, is that SWAT Team is not a cookie-cutter operation. The Swat Team develops a strategic plan for each company only after an extensive survey of the company's market and a thorough re-evaluation of its targets and goals. It involves extensive interviewing and database work, using technology to better understand targets and craft an integrated marketing strategy.

About a dozen years ago, however, Antik realized that those same strategic skills could be adapted to other environments and that "a-ha moment," as he calls it, changed the course of his life.

Two of Antik's three children have learning disabilities. After traveling the country seeking treatment, word of mouth finally led him to North Carolina, and Dr. Mel Levine.

Levine had a unique approach and an undeniable talent for helping children classified as learning disabled—and a belief that every child had particular strengths and intelligence that only needed to be discovered and encouraged.

Through his neurodevelopmental content, which emphasized ‘strengthening strengths,' Levine was not only creating success at learning but also providing hope and satisfaction for many struggling students.

Yet Levine's reach was limited.

"I told the doctor that what he was doing was a breakthrough," Antik says, "but wouldn't it be useful to reach millions of people, rather than thousands?"

Antik devoted six months to writing a business plan for Levine, using the same market insight techniques that Swat Team Partners applied to companies like Unisys or Limited Brand.

He thoroughly studied the marketplace to understand who was offering services to parents and children with learning disabilities, what made Levine unique, and how he could best exploit his strengths.

"Levine has a unique developmental view that focuses on the fact that as children grow and change over time, sooner or later most will face a learning situation which they are not wired for," explains Antik. "His perspective on learning is critical to understanding and nurturing a child's mind."

Antik helped Levine create programs to train doctors and produce patient care plans, reach school administrators and teachers, and provide support materials for parents. He also drafted a plan to get Levine in the public eye—including specific goals for him accomplish like writing a book every year, giving at least 20 speeches a year and making high-profile media appearances.

Fast-forward to the present: Levine is co-founder and co-chair of All Kinds of Minds, a non-profit organization dedicated to helping parents, teachers, clinicians and students not only understand differences in learning, but how all students can be successful.

His program reaches some 3.5 million kids and his organization has raised $70 million. He even appears on the Oprah Winfrey show.

Antik himself has learned valuable lessons about pursuing his passion as well as his vocation.

"My philosophy was that I've had success on the corporate business side, but that same need is there on the other side—the arts and education and health care—the non-profit side," he says. "It's a different culture, but they face the same issues."

Antik now spends about 30 percent of his time helping those on "the other side."

"What I saw many times is that these are brilliant people with great ideas, but they're missing 1, 2, 3, or 4 kinds of skills," Antik says. With the Swat Team continuing to succeed on the corporate side, Antik now has set himself a new goal: "Find 100 bright minds, with 100 great ideas, with a long view of up to 100 years—you can help them impact 100,000,000 lives."

He has six such projects in progress, Antik says. But the future is limitless.