Randy Best, who is a very young 60 years of age, is a natural-born entrepreneur and has been starting businesses of one kind or another since he was a teenager. He has a passion for testing himself against the limits, especially when it means challenging the status quo. “Almost every venture I’ve been in,” he told me, “involved going against the status quo. I was always trying to fundamentally change the way industry operates. From the very first venture I ever attempted, there was always some significant paradigm shift in the approach I would take.”

Over more than twenty years, Randy started dozens of companies. At one point he was involved in the management of twenty-one businesses at the same time. But one day he woke up and said, Why am I doing this? Why do I have this need to start so many companies and take such risks? “I suppose a psychiatrist would say that I was constantly testing myself, to compensate in some way,” he said. “But I began to think how selfish I was, always putting my family at risk, always pushing myself to see what my limits were.”

But Randy told me about something else that impacted his thinking at the time—something that was personally gratifying for me to hear. “I remember being together in Santa Fe where you spoke, Bob,” Randy said, “and you described the concepts that you ultimately included in your book, Halftime. That really started me thinking. That night I decided that what I was doing was foolish. It might have been an interesting test of nerves for a younger man, but over the rest of my life I needed to find some other way to express my need for a challenge.

“Whatever that would be,” Randy continued, “I wanted it to be consistent with the ideas you talked about that night. I’m sure those ideas have impacted a lot of people’s lives, but they had a profound intellectual impact on me. So I decided that I was going to test myself. I knew I wanted to do it in a social area. And I decided that the best way I could achieve something worthwhile and have a long-term positive impact would be to touch the lives of children.”

What really mattered to Randy Best was touching people’s lives where it counted. He had been active in church work and over a period of time, had helped to organize, plan, build, and fund dozens of new church starts in Mexico. But as he explored other ideas, he thought of his own lifelong struggle with learning disability.

Randy is dyslexic. To this day, he told me, he has never read an entire book for himself. He has listened to hundreds of tapes, and friends and family (including his mother and his wife) have read books, lessons, and reports to him. But suddenly he realized that his own struggles in that area could be the foundation for a new venture in the field of education. From this emerged the Voyager program that he now heads: an innovative learning initiative that has involved him in public education in a big way.

“My mother was a public school teacher for forty-three years,” Randy said. “She started teaching at eighteen, became a principal at twenty-one, and gave her whole life to public education. So I was always around it. I went through public education myself, and it was excellent in my hometown. I realize, however, that this isn’t true in most places. And ever since I read the report ‘A Nation at Risk,’ put together by a blue-ribbon panel of educators back in the early-eighties, I knew that something had to be done.”

The conclusion of that now-famous study was that American public education was a disaster, tragically flawed in curriculum, pedagogy, teacher preparation, and every other way. The researchers equated the decline in America’s schools to an attack on this country by a foreign power. “When I read that,” Randy said. “two things came to my mind: First, I thought, Somebody ought to do something about this. And then I thought, That person is me.”

Ready for a new challenge, Randy knew that the goal wasn’t making millions of dollars for himself but making a difference in the lives of millions of children. “Fortunately,” he said, “this was something I knew I could do. I had a habit of sticking with things even when we were taking on water, and I could see that reforming public education wasn’t going to be easy. But I knew that if I got started in this, I would never give up, and that maybe with that kind of determination, and coming at it from a slightly different angle, I could make a difference where others had failed.”

The Voyager program, which is designed to prepare public school teachers for their classroom duties and to refocus the curriculum to make sure that kids learn how to read, has been controversial from the start. But it has also been effective, and it is now being adopted by some of the largest and most troubled school districts in the country, including New York City, Philadelphia, Washington, DC, and others.

“In the beginning,” Randy said, “my partner and I decided to limit ourselves to one or two of the biggest issues confronting the schools. If those things could be fundamentally changed, we would gain a foothold to change the whole system. I calculated that we could have as much as an eighty-percent impact if we focused on just the top two issues, so that’s what we did.”

“What are those issues? The first was instructional quality,” Randy said. “Poor education isn’t the fault of children; it’s the fault of adults.” He believed that if instructional quality improved dramatically, then learning would improve in all areas. The second issue was to make sure that all children learn to read, and that was a personal matter because of his own experience.

Running With Endurance

---

Today the Voyager program has two affiliates, a higher education division focused on assisting with the professional development of in-service teachers, and a reading program written and funded primarily by Randy. The investment of approximately $40 million to date, from his own resources and those of various other investors, has sponsored research exploring how the brain works and how young children learn. In their studies, researchers found that ninety-five percent of all children who attend public schools are “literacy capable.”

“That discovery made a huge impression on me,” Randy said. “When I heard that, I said, if 95 percent of our kids are literacy capable, then why in some districts are only about twenty percent actually reading? That’s precisely the question Governor George W. Bush asked us at the time. Bush said. ‘If 95 percent of our children can read, why do fewer than fifty percent of them read?’ Well, that’s the question Voyager is answering.”

If all goes as planned, fully ninety-five percent of school kids will be able read in the next generation. Randy and his colleagues are creating materials to teach teachers how to implement these new programs. “So that’s my challenge now,” Randy told me. “And if I may say so, we’re having a profound impact.”

Randy is a great example of a life theme carried over from his business life into his second-half life of new purpose. His entrepreneurial skills were simply transformed from one venue to another, in this case to public education. His new challenge meant going up against the status quo, trying to change the ingrained nature of an industry. But Randy wasn’t looking for an easy job in the first place. He wanted to make a real and lasting difference. Clearly, he is succeeding at that, and America and generations of young children will be the beneficiaries.

At the end of our conversation, I had one more question for Randy. “When I say the word retirement, what comes to your mind?”

He smiled and said, “Well, I know what the term means, but — and this is probably unfair — it says to me that you want to live your life completely selfishly. A retired person is just living for himself or herself, that’s how I see it. They have put off doing the things they always wanted to do when they were younger, and now they’re spending their remaining years satisfying their personal whims and desires. I can’t even imagine that for myself. What do you do? You travel? You play golf? I can’t even imagine not having a purpose beyond just living out my remaining years in such an aimless, self-indulgent sort of way.”

“But,” I challenged him, “surely for some people retirement is a good thing: its risk aversion, security, going someplace like the golf club where people are paid to cater to you.”

“Not even a consideration in my mind,” he said with a laugh. “The only way I think you should opt out where you’re no longer trying to make a contribution, is if you have some physical or mental problem. As long as you’re able to do something meaningful, why would you want to go into some kind of holding pattern?”

Reprinted with permission from Finishing Well, by Bob Buford (Integrity, 2004).